Summary
Germany’s government approved a proposal allowing the military to shoot down drones over critical infrastructure as a last resort.
The move responds to rising sightings of suspicious drones, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with concerns over espionage and sabotage.
Recent incidents include up to 10 drones spotted over Bavaria’s Manching air base, raising security fears.
Previously, the military could only force drones to land, redirect, or issue warnings.
Well, if we’re talking about a policing role, it may be fine.
In war, if Country A and Country B are arm-wrestling, and Country A can launch a drone that costs a tenth of what Country B’s missiles do, you can probably guess that Country A is going to keep sending drones, because that’s a pretty favorable exchange. Gotta worry about what happens if it scales up.
But if we’re talking a policing role and don’t expect hundreds or thousands of drones to be sent out – like, the aim is countering espionage or sabotage – that might be okay.
Now, granted, one possibility is that someone might try to figure out a way to send large numbers of drones to do the above, but then that starts to stand out. I think that the current situation is probably more of one where the concern is that malicious drone operators are trying to hide in the noise created by benign drone operators. We don’t easily know whether a given drone is just some random person flying a drone where it shouldn’t be, or whether it’s someone trying to gather intelligence. But if spies start launching a hundred drones at a go, it’s going to be pretty obvious that it’s not just some random person making a mistake.
EDIT:
I remember just reading about some kind of programmable-airburst SPAAG that Germany’s sending Ukraine, think it was on a Boxer chassis. Assuming that Germany isn’t sending every one of those that they have, they probably have some to stick around sensitive areas of their own.
kagis
https://mil.in.ua/en/news/ukraine-is-likely-to-receive-boxer-infantry-fighting-vehicles/
https://www.rheinmetall.com/Rheinmetall Group/brochure-download/Weapon-Ammmunition/B305e0424-MK30-2-ABM-automatic-cannon.pdf
So if you plonk one of those in the middle of a military base or whatever, you’ve got a sphere of something like 3km radius.
looks further
It also looks like there’s some fancier thing that has both a gun and missiles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyranger_30
Assuming that the “Group I” here is the same as the US classification scheme for UASes and Germany isn’t doing some unrelated-but-similarly-named classification system, it’s intended for use against fairly small drones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle#Terminology
Given that the RCH 155 is a self-propelled artillery that can shoot and manoeuvre like a tank, just in 155mm, and Skyshield turrets don’t mind shooting horizontally either, no you don’t want to get close to an angry bunch of them.
The Heeresflugabwehrtruppe won’t be reconstituted before 2028 that’s when those new Skyshield-based systems will arrive in series, from what I understand anything before that will go to Ukraine. If you’re not putting infantry into those bellies I guess they could carry munitions for the RCH 155s? Those want to shoot and scoot you gotta keep up and even loading and unloading troops will only slow them down. Having a system that does air defence, ground defence against everything that’s not heavily armored (and even that if there’s a manpad launcher somewhere), and also cargo does sound sensible, it can flexibly support artillery, infantry, logistics, everything.
Oh. Drone operators. You can taxi those around there’s no place in the RCH 155s.
Presumably if it’s Russian it would be quite large or if it’s small it’s piloted by some one relatively close on the ground