3/18/2024 0 Comments 3 types of gun jams![]() ![]() While the 2016 West Point scenario involved a jammer set up to specifically defeat the drone fielded, the lessons are ones being applied broadly today. Another soldier sights down a drone with the Dronebuster. To stop it, the assaulting platoon could employ a specially set up jammer rifle, configured to knock out that specific Parrot drone. This “urban” area was a half-dozen cinder block buildings in the woods in New York, and for the drone part of the exercise, the defenders (with an instructor operating the controls) would fly a commercial Parrot drone as a scout, letting them call in simulated artillery on their mock enemies. These cadets, all future officer candidates at the Army’s foremost military officer training school, traditionally have to engage in an “urban assault,” where a platoon of 40 or so cadets attack a compound defended by a squad of 10 or so underclassmen. In June 2016, Popular Science reported on an exercise undertaken at West Point, where the Army Cyber Institute anticipated the coming preponderance of drones in war, and found a way to train cadets in their use and defeat. A Dronebuster 3B seen from underneath, revealing the asymmetric shape of its “barrel.” Mariah Y. Finding and stopping them means using everything from high powered microwaves to lasers to, like the Dronebusters, handheld jammers. Scouting and bombing aircraft used to at least be large enough to contain a pilot, making them a big target for missiles or guns, but small drones are orders of magnitude cheaper. They are one of the more straightforward attempts to meet the evolving threats on modern battlefields brought about by the abundance of cheap commercial drones in the hands of everyone from professional militaries to insurgent forces. Hand-held drone jammers are relatively new for militaries, with many developed over the 2010s and the 2020s. A familiar rifle sight is mounted on top, letting the soldier use familiar skills for targeting to aim the jammer. A paratrooper directs the Dronebuster 3B against a drone. That is important, as one of the main ways hobbyist drones can mitigate loss of control is by navigating to known home coordinates by GPS. Also, Dronebusters can overwhelm Global Navigation Satellite Systems, like GPS, though there are several others. In other words, the gun can jam the drone to uselessness over radio frequency channels. The drone operator has no control of the drone while the command link is being overwhelmed with RF energy.” “This causes the drone to either stop and hover, or return to the operator, depending on the model of drone. “The Dronebuster Block 3, and Dronebuster Block 3B were designed to interrupt the control of the drone by overwhelming the control frequency,” reads the description from Flex Force. It comes in a tan-beige plastic reminiscent of computers from the early 1990s, with the pistol grip transforming it from an electronic novelty to an especially curious weapon. The tool used at Exercise Shield is the Dronebuster 3B, made by Flex Force. As the drones flew, soldiers pointed blocky gun-shaped tools into the air, and sent the quadcopters back to the ground. Learning to defeat these drones, and using specific tools for the task, was one goal of Exercise Shield, an air defense and electronic warfare exercise that ran from April 19 through April 21. The quadcopters, launched against a coastal backdrop, were testing tools for US soldiers, hobbyist types of the kind that soldiers can now expect to encounter on battlefields. ![]() Under a cloudy sky above Pula, Croatia, on April 21, drones took flight like high-tech clay pigeons. This US Army paratrooper is using a Dronebuster 3B in an April exercise in Croatia. ![]()
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