With the massive proliferation of drones, I see it as only a matter of time until we have this kind of system set up to fire light flak capable of shooting down small drones at ranges of a couple hundred meters. Honestly, I’m a bit surprised we haven’t seen it yet.
Conventional military doctrine is that infantry and vehicles should operate together. A couple vehicle-mounted automated flak guns capable of reliably shooting down drones at a couple hundred meters would heavily negate the absolutely debilitating threat that FPV- and dropper drones present to both infantry and mechanised columns today. If they’re able to build man-portable versions as well the drone threat will be completely changed.
Basically, the current picture of drone warfare looks to me like if people invented fighter jets but no AA. Eventually the AA is bound to catch up.
It is only a matter of time. I suspect it is a bit of a complicated task to develop reliably, but it will definitely be the future of anti-drone warfare.
Something like a Gepard flakpanzer with automated aim would be invaluable.
Exactly. Air warfare has, since its inception, migrated towards more and more high-tech solutions. Modern fighters require modern AA missiles to counter, etc. Drones have flipped this in a sense by swarming in with cheap, low tech (compared to a modern fighter) weapons, that you can’t afford to shoot down with modern AA designed for those fighters. The response will have to be a cheap, low tech (again, relative) solution like flak. Flak went out of use because it didn’t have the accuracy or range to deal with modern fighters/missiles. That’s not a problem against drones. Additionally, drones are much slower and more fragile than a jet, so require far less heavy weapons to shoot down.
And we now have the ability for much more accurate automated aiming than what flak was capable of.