If I understand correctly, a jammer puts out a bunch of RF to overload a drone’s remote link or GPS signal. Why wouldn’t it be trivially easy to just home in on that transmitter and destroy it?
In: Engineering
Others have noted that there are weapons designed specifically for this, but also bear in mind that jammers
* can be mobile
* can easily be turned on and off if there’s a threat detected (or just at random intervals)
* can be part of a network of multiple jammers
If you add in the possibility that the enemy can track threats and respond by turning jammers off and on, then your attack becomes orders of magnitude more complex.
Basically when you’re thinking about military tactics and asking a question like this, the answer is usually to assume that whatever you’re thinking of is possible, but to then imagine that if you were on the other side (“How do I protect my jammers from attacks using the signal to home in?”) and keep going back and forth. Often you’ll see that for specific scenarios the cost of a given strategy would be way more than the cost of countering it.
The obvious example I always think of is the [Strategic Defense Initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative) or “Star Wars” program that was supposed to create a defense against ICBM delivered nuclear weapons. It got lots of hype, and I’m sure lots of defense contractor employees retired off the pork fat that it generated, but the problem is that the cost of developing it would always be orders of magnitude to the cost of creating countermeasures to bypass or overwhelm the defenses.
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