Comment by AngryData
1 year ago
Im more worried about these type of things causing us to blast each other and ourselves back to the 1920s or so during conflicts when small explosive EMPs start being viewed as less damaging than drones and robots. A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast. The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage, but if drone bombs represent even more damage they become viable. Yeah it will destroy all the radios around and fuck up a bunch of expensive equipment, but you would still have soldiers with guns rather than just smoking craters.
> A fast explosive on the back of a neodynium magnet and a few coils of copper can make a hell of an EMP blast.
I'm having a hard time believing this is effective.
> The only reason we don't use them now is due to all the collateral damage
Russians don't care about collateral damage and there doesn't seem to be any evidence of them using such weapons?
Nobody really uses much undirected EM warfare in my opinion because it represents a huge escalation in a war, similar to the use of indiscriminate chemical weapons, or even nuclear weapons.
It would be devastating in the local battlefield, potentially frying radio or other equipment depending on the size of the device or how close you could lob it towards the enemy before going off; but with the low wattages many non-military communication devices use today you would also be blasting horrible noise to all of them beyond the local area and disrupting communications across potentially multiple neutral countries.
It would be a large act of aggression against any countries around them and NATO, and at scale possibly even piss off far away countries like the US and China. Especially large EMP devices could even be temporarily misidentified as a nuclear explosion and gain the immediate full attention by any nuclear powers watching out for it.
An EMP large enough to be an international incident is a nuclear explosion. The effective range of one pumped by a conventional explosive is very small.
For undirected EMPs, consider that a lightning strike is in the region of about 5 gigajoules, and the difficulty of pumping that much energy through a coil.
My expectation is that a CHAMP warhead (not missile, warhead) would have a EMP range of something under 300m (probably less), even then vs. unshielded electronics (compare the effect on your body of being in a car that's struck by lightning vs. being on a 100m away on an open field that's struck by lightning), and only even that much by having a high gain (highly directional) antenna: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-electronics_High_Power...
That said:
> but with the low wattages many non-military communication devices use today you would also be blasting horrible noise to all of them beyond the local area and disrupting communications across potentially multiple neutral countries.
This doesn't need an EMP, it's "just" jamming, and Russia (amongst others) already does this: https://gpsjam.org/?lat=50.32113&lon=41.41602&z=3.0&date=202...
I think you're wildly over stating the effective range of EMP. This isn't Goldeneye.
You could do EMP, but you could also do some sort of point-defense turret. Drones are lightweight and fragile, so it doesn't need to be big - just fast and auto-targeting.
Didn't they try this in Ukraine and it doesn't work? Any point installation is quickly overwhelmed. The only answer to FPV drones so far seems to be more FPV drones. Though they're not using fully-autonomous drones in Ukraine yet, so that might still play out.
“[As of May 2025] Ukraine has developed and successfully tested the Sky Sentinel – an AI-powered, fully automated turret designed to shoot down Russian drones and missiles… the M2 is known to have an effective range of 1.5 kilometers against airborne threats. Each unit costs approximately $150,000. Developers estimate that protecting a city would require 10 to 30 turrets… Given that each Iranian-made Shahed-136 drone used by Russia costs around $100,000, Sky Sentinel offers a scalable and cost-effective solution to a persistent and deadly threat.”
https://www.kyivpost.com/analysis/53546
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