Ukraine is using a network made up of thousands of acoustic sensors across the country to help detect and track incoming Russian kamikaze drones, alert traditional air defenses in advance, and also dispatch ad hoc drone hunting teams to shoot them down. This is according to the U.S. Air Force’s top officer in Europe who also said the U.S. military is now looking to test this capability to see if it might help meet its own demands for additional ways to persistently monitor for, and engag,e drone threats.
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“Think if you have a series of sensors, think of your cell phone, okay, with power to it, so it doesn’t die, right? And then you put a microphone to kind of make the acoustics louder of one-way UAVs that are going overhead,” Hecker explained. “And you have … 6,000 of these things all over the country. They’ve been successful in being able to pick up the one-way UAVs like Shahed 136s and those kinds of things.”
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Kamikaze drones like the Shahed-136 may have relatively small engines, but they still produce a significant and often terrifying amount of noise
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How the acoustic sensor information is disseminated is unclear, but this could very well involve leveraging an existing ad hoc drone spotting network that Ukraine has had in place for some time now that allows volunteers to post alerts via the Telegram online messaging service.
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many modern aerial threats, including small, low-flying drones and cruise missiles, and stealthy crewed and uncrewed aircraft and missiles, present significant challenges to even current generation radars. Gen. Hecker first mentioned the U.S. military’s interest in Ukraine’s acoustic sensor network at the roundtable today while talking about challenges NATO is facing in maintaining a persistent ISR picture when it comes to things like kamikaze drones and cruise missiles.
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Source: Thousands Of Networked Microphones Are Tracking Drones In Ukraine
Robin Edgar
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