Conor Gallagher

bullets into the air and you don't know where they'll land uh but it's you need more and it's been realized that you need more because some modern drones can be controlled by artificial intelligence and don't actually need to be controlled by the ground some others can be controlled by very long fiber optic wires and jamming or you know soft killing just doesn't work against them so you need to have what they call a hard kill solution as well as a backup and that's

what it sounds like, that's shooting them out of the sky using various types of weapons.

And so they have been training troops in air gunnery.

So that will literally be someone in a helicopter firing a door-mounted machine gun at low-flying drones.

The PC-9 turboprop trainer aircraft are being fitted with specialised anti-drone weapons.

Perhaps most dramatically, soldiers are being trained on the use of

shotguns which you know were kind of a military anachronism uh before the war in ukraine they'd limited um use but they have proven themselves in ukraine as um an effective last-ditch resort weapon against drones it was described to me kind of very similar to clay pigeon shooting you load them up with birdshot which has a wide spread which makes it kind

Sorry, easier, it's not easy to shoot down drones if everything else fails.

Yeah, so other militaries are also waking up to this and are a bit ahead of us.

And yeah, in the UK, even soldiers are being encouraged to take part.

in clay pigeon shooting, because it's, it's pretty much exactly the same, um, skill set.

But as I said, that that's very much a last resort.

Um, if, if, you know, it comes to that situation where you're firing at a drone from a shotgun thing, a few other things have already gone wrong.

The other thing they're, they're, they're focusing on is training Naval service, uh, members, uh, to shoot drones out of the sky.

Um, you know, and this is very much informed by what happened last December in Dublin Bay.

where the sailors couldn't shoot the drone because they'd be basically firing into civilian airspace.

And, you know, obvious danger is there.

Well, that's where the training comes in, I suppose, where the training will be in, obviously, first in identifying the drones and determining that they're a threat and considering your fields of fire.

So being very aware of, you know, if you have to open fire, where those bullets are going to land.

But another...