In 1940, during the Battle of Britain, the RAF came to protect airfields and factories with thousands of posts and kilometers of cables to make flight difficult low of the German planes. Eight decades later, armies are once again resorting to physical barriers to stop aerial threats, although the enemy no longer flies at hundreds of kilometers per hour, but rather fits in a backpack and costs a few hundred euros.
A strange image. Two anti-aircraft guns covered by a species wrapped metal dome in fishing nets do not exactly seem like the latest military technology. However, that image sums up better than any report how modern warfare has changed.
Taiwan has begun to protect some of its Skyguard systems with anti-drone networks because it has come to terms with an uncomfortable reality: even weapons designed to shoot down aerial threats can become victims of cheap drones if they remain exposed.
The problem is small. For decades, anti-aircraft systems were designed to confront airplanes, helicopters or missiles. Today they must add a completely different enemy: small fpv drones capable of launching directly onto a radar or cannon following an almost vertical trajectory.
In a hypothetical conflict, Beijing would not only use drones to attack, but also to locate targets, relay communications, conduct electronic warfare or saturate Taiwanese defenses until they are forced to expend ammunition before the main threat arrives.
Cages covering the cannons
The irony. The Swiss Skyguard system was born in the middle of the cold warbut continues to be a key piece of Taiwan’s air defense. Its 35 mm cannons can use programmable ammunition AHEADwhich explodes in front of the target, releasing a cloud of subprojectiles that is especially effective against drones, cruise missiles or small projectiles.
Precisely because it is still so useful, protecting it has become a priority: losing the weapon that is supposed to shoot down drones because of another drone would be a difficult blow to take.
Networks as a solution. At first glance they may seem improvised, but they respond to a very clear logic. An FPV drone needs to directly hit its target to destroy it; a metal structure covered with netting can cause it to detonate before reaching the radar or gun mechanisms, absorbing some of the impact and keeping the system operational.
It is a philosophy that has already been seen and counted in Ukrainewhere roads, armor, artillery pieces and even boats They have begun to cover themselves with cages and nets to survive an extremely cheap threat.
Years of preparation. Networks are just one piece of a much larger plan. The Taiwanese air force has been training for some time to disperse their planes between secondary airfields and highways, while the army hides tanks and vehicles between buildings or disguises them as civilian machinery to make their identification difficult.
The idea is simple: if China manages to locate and destroy the most valuable systems during the first hours of an attack, the island’s resistance capacity would be drastically reduced.
Drones force us to reinvent. Still, perhaps the biggest lesson is not that Taiwan has placed nets over cannons, but that air defense is entering in a new stage. For decades, the technological advantage consisted of building more powerful radars, faster missiles or more precise guns.
Now it is also about preventing a low-cost drone from finding a weak point to crash into. That one of the most representative images of this new technological race is a sophisticated anti-aircraft system protected by a simple network says a lot about how war is changing.
Image | YOUTH DAILY NEWS
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