Yet another follow-up. Maybe everyone can’t carry a shotgun. But it might be possible to have something like a 40mm canister round if they are issued rifles with an underbarrel grenade launcher. That’d give them at least one shot with something maybe more-effective than rifle rounds.
Taking a quick skim, it looks like there is a canister munition for NATO 40mm grenade launchers:
HVCC, high-velocity canister cartridge[40] Canister shot containing several flechettes. Produces a 3 to 4 ft (0.91 to 1.2 m) wide dispersion pattern at 50 m (164 ft).[40]
So, we have stockpiles of that now. General Dynamics isn’t billing it as an anti-drone weapon in that PDF, but I would bet that it’d work. I would bet that the rounds aren’t that expensive (relative to other things that might be used for anti-drone defense). And as the above PDF points out, you can use them in an automatic grenade launcher, which a lot of light armor has…you can maybe convert an automatic grenade launcher into a potent short-range anti-air point-defense weapon with that.
While I’m looking at that, I notice that they also have the XM1176, which has a programmable air-burst fuze. I remember when the US military was looking into maybe issuing airbursting grenade launchers a while back:
They decided that they didn’t like the thing, so we don’t have a big stockpile of those. And the OICW wasn’t designed for shooting down aerial targets; it was intended to permit hitting targets behind cover. But…the programmable-time fuze munitions, in a different device capable of getting the range on an aerial target, might work well against drones. If you have an OICW-like device capable of identifying, calculating the range to, and then setting the range on a programmable fuze, an airbursting munition might actually do pretty well in bringing down a drone. Functionally act kind of like a proximity fuze, with less complexity on the munition, and that made a major difference in World War II, the last time that we were doing a lot of antiaircraft gunnery.
Yet another follow-up. Maybe everyone can’t carry a shotgun. But it might be possible to have something like a 40mm canister round if they are issued rifles with an underbarrel grenade launcher. That’d give them at least one shot with something maybe more-effective than rifle rounds.
Taking a quick skim, it looks like there is a canister munition for NATO 40mm grenade launchers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_40_mm_grenades
https://www.gd-ots.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/40mm-M1001-HVCC.pdf
So, we have stockpiles of that now. General Dynamics isn’t billing it as an anti-drone weapon in that PDF, but I would bet that it’d work. I would bet that the rounds aren’t that expensive (relative to other things that might be used for anti-drone defense). And as the above PDF points out, you can use them in an automatic grenade launcher, which a lot of light armor has…you can maybe convert an automatic grenade launcher into a potent short-range anti-air point-defense weapon with that.
While I’m looking at that, I notice that they also have the XM1176, which has a programmable air-burst fuze. I remember when the US military was looking into maybe issuing airbursting grenade launchers a while back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XM29_OICW
They decided that they didn’t like the thing, so we don’t have a big stockpile of those. And the OICW wasn’t designed for shooting down aerial targets; it was intended to permit hitting targets behind cover. But…the programmable-time fuze munitions, in a different device capable of getting the range on an aerial target, might work well against drones. If you have an OICW-like device capable of identifying, calculating the range to, and then setting the range on a programmable fuze, an airbursting munition might actually do pretty well in bringing down a drone. Functionally act kind of like a proximity fuze, with less complexity on the munition, and that made a major difference in World War II, the last time that we were doing a lot of antiaircraft gunnery.