Drones as Weapons

[Kanastrous]

More precisely, drones -themselves- used as weapons, ie not as a launch platform for ordnance but being deliberately crashed into a target, purposely destroying both target and drone. I have someone claiming that drones have been employed in this way, and I'm curious as to whether or not anyone has ever heard of deliberately destroying the drones themselves like that, rather than launching their payload and returning to their base.

[Sea Skimmer]

That's called a cruise missile normally, been around since world war one and all... The AGM-136 Tactic Rainbow and the Israeli Harpy forexample both operate in a autonomous cruise-surveillance mode and then engaged hostile radars if they begin transmission via crashing into them. A lot of anti ship missiles are functionally the same, if you dare let them decide which cruise ship to immolate.

One small missile does exist that gets called a drone because it has a daylight TV camera and is intended to cruise for a while looking for a target under direct operator control, then hit it and explode with a warhead. Impossible to recover and the warhead is integral so calling it a drone is rather dubious, but that's what they call it for marking. Forget the name right now but we had a thread on it before.

As for taking a normal recon drone and flying into the target, it might have happened one or two random times, but I've never heard of it and it does not pass the smell test for anything but a possible random event. Most drones are too small to be even remotely effective in this manner, indeed the most numerous like Raven would not even kill a man if they hit him directly except maybe in the head and only then if the person did not have baseball bat or trashcan lid for self defense, while the larger ones are very expensive, and very clumsy to control. Striking a target small enough to destroy in a kamikaze run would be extremely difficult, and makes very little sense compared to keeping the target under surveillance until an armed aircraft can show up to bomb it. The bigger ones are also more likely to be armed in the first place.

Its the kind of thing that just isn't going to happen unless maybe the crew had the resurrected corpse of Osama Bin Laden in their sights and even then, one would prefer tracking to a slow clumsy suicide run. A Reaper flies 300mph max in level flight, I doubt it can go much faster in a dive without breaking up structurally, most drones are much slower. This means your noisy kamikaze run is going to be heard, and the people will have time to scatter and look for recover. One of the reasons the drone strikes in Pakistan are so successful at killing people normally is because the drones fly to high to be heard, or seen with the naked eye. Though SOCOM also flies some small drones at low level disguised as birds. Those are in the 'might not kill a guy' class. They also go like 40mph so the enemy might be able to just side step the thing and laugh as it splats on theground.

[Kanastrous]

thanks!