I'm wondering if the targeting radar from a DDG could fry a small drone mid-flight?
Well probably not - every time we had flight quarters to launch or recover helos, I had to secure the aft SPY array so that we didn't fry the crew of the helo, or going alongside another ship, you secure the SPY arrays on the engaged side.
The helo's fine, but the crew not so much. A drone would be similar - the radiation hazard distance for the radar wouldn't be far enough to affect a drone at the distance they're probably talking about in this incident.
I'm wondering if the drone was observed prior to interfering with the stack. The SPY radar is really good at picking up contacts to the point of information overload and exceeding the track limitation of the track database. The radar can track outgoing 5-inch and 25mm rounds fired from the ship. So you have to implement filters to declutter the radar. Since the filters are built by humans, there's always a chance of decluttering and ignoring important tracks like the inbound drone that got into the marshal stack, i.e. the radar detected the drone, but to prevent clutter humans told the radar to drop the track because it did or didn't meet certain criteria .
I'm not on scene, so I can always play monday-morning quarterback even though I shouldn't... I guess if I were there, at the minimum I'd designate it a bogey. How to get rid of it. It's inside the marshal stack, so it's well inside missile engagement zone, and well inside any of my DCA stations where I'd have CAP aircraft assigned to deal with air threats. A missile engagement is the fastest way to deal with it, but I'd have friendlies I'd have to scram in order to prevent an inadvertent engagement.
But if you scram the aircraft / move the marshal stack, the drone just follows. Warning it over the radio issuing level 1 and level 2s all day not interfere doesn't do any good - there's no one listening - it's just going to keep doing what it's going to do.
It's almost too close for area defense. The marshall stack is probably too far for point defense with Sea Sparrow. You can't engage with CIWS or SeaRAM unless the drone is flying directly at the weapons mount. So it leaves me with engaging with SM-2 or 5-inch with HE-IR or bringing the CAP off station all the way back to mother, or having the aircraft in marshall engage it - if they have ordnance for it - they might have ordnance, but aircraft in marshall usually are low on fuel at that point in the cycle so probably wouldn't have the fuel to conduct an engagement.
Putting an SM-2 in the air is like swinging a sledgehammer at a fly if there are friendlies in the area. I really don't want to be putting birds in the air as I can't provide terminal guidance until the missile is less than 2 seconds from intercept when the illuminator is assigned. 5-inch HE-IR - I'd better hope that the drone doesn't fly in front of any friendly surface or air units down range.
Probably try to jam the drone's uplink with SLQ-32 but who knows where its going to go when it loses comm.
So jam the uplink, move the marshal stack, see where where the drone goes, as soon as downrange is clear of friendlies, take it with birds, and since you always back up missiles with guns, cover with 5-inch HE-IR, 20 rounds rapid continuous.
There is where I want USNS Ponce with its laser to be onstation. Something available today that wasn't available 15 years ago. Unfortunately we only have one laser for the entire Navy and it cant be everywhere.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/politics/us-navy-drone-laser-weapon/index.html
