October 07, 2024 at 1:48 p.m. ET
Drones, particularly aerial drones (or what the U.S. military calls “unmanned aerial systems”), are all the rage in warfare. Hailed as the new wonder weapon of the 21st century, they are employed in combat by Ukraine and Russia, and by Israel and Hezbollah.
Drones conduct surveillance missions (making it almost impossible for ground forces to advance undetected) and strike missions — either by doing an explosives-laden kamikaze dive at a target or by firing a missile or dropping a bomb. And drones are so cheap and widely available that any armed group in the world can now field its own air force — or its own navy. Ukraine, lacking a conventional navy of its own, used sea drones to disable at least a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and reopen the Black Sea to Ukrainian exports.
In the history of warfare, there is always a lag between offensive innovations and defensive reactions. So, at the moment, defenses against drones are struggling to keep up with their rapidly evolving capabilities, particularly given the constant innovations undertaken by Russian and Ukrainian drone developers and operators. That creates a growing vulnerability for the U.S. armed forces that the Pentagon — one of the world’s largest bureaucracies — is struggling to address.
In late September, the Defense Department announced a new initiative known as Replicator 2 to field drone defenses, but the initiative’s fate, coming at the tail end of the Biden administration, remains uncertain at a time when the need has never been greater.
High-end hardware such as the Patriot surface-to-air missile system is best reserved for taking down cruise missiles, ballistic missiles or enemy bombers: You don’t want to waste a $4 million Patriot missile on shooting down a drone that might cost less than $1,000. But that leaves armed forces around the world, including the U.S. military, scrambling to figure out how to detect and defeat drones, especially smaller, lower-cost drones like the first-person-view models widely used in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Talking with experts in the nascent counter-drone field, I often hear variations on “there is no panacea,” as Chris Bonzagni, a former U.S. Air Force officer, told me. (He is now the founder of Contact Front Technologies, a firm that helps Ukraine to integrate cutting-edge military systems from allies.)
Various acoustic sensors have been developed to detect smaller drones (Ukraine has been using, among other methods, a network of cellphones), and many methods are being developed to intercept them. These include automated Gatling (i.e., machine) guns; small missiles; air-defense drones that crash into other drones or use nets to bring them down; radio-frequency jammers; cyberweapons that can take control of drones; and lasers and high-powered microwave weapons that can zap drones. Some countries have even experimented with using birds of prey such as trained eagles to attack drones — obviously an approach that is hard to scale. In a throwback to the early days of aerial warfare, Ukraine has been deploying its own drones to bring down Russian drones in aerial dogfights. None of these methods is close to foolproof; Ukraine’s top general said in August that his forces were intercepting less than half of Russia’s drones.
Mark D. Jacobsen, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who is now director of research and development at Tilt Autonomy (which develops unmanned weapons systems), emphasized to me the “need for a system of systems, because any one detect-and-defeat modality has real limitations.” In other words, a full-spectrum drone defense requires many different technologies integrated to work seamlessly together — and it has to be done cheaply enough to be scalable against a low-cost threat that is constantly evolving and expanding. Almost every major defense manufacturer (including Raytheon and Northrop Grumman) has entered the market, with some of the most inventive solutions coming from start-ups such as Anduril, Dedrone and Fortem Technologies.
A senior Defense Department official assured me that the Pentagon has been focused on the problem and is making progress. The U.S. military has already fielded directed-energy weapons and other innovative systems against drones. A Joint Counter-Small UAS Office has been set up in the Pentagon, and a Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems University has opened at Fort Sill, Okla., to study and teach drone-fighting techniques. This year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin set up a departmentwide Warfighter Senior Integration Group to coordinate and accelerate the acquisition of drone defenses among all the military services.
The senior defense official pointed out to me the success that the U.S. military has had in shooting down drones fired by the Houthis in Yemen — including drones aimed at U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea. “We’ve tested and fielded pretty much everything you can think of,” this official told me. “You look at the number of attacks that have been carried out since Oct. 7 [2023] against U.S. forces in Central Command or U.S. ships in the area, and you will see that our counter-UAS systems are working and working quite well.”
No defense is perfect, however, and there has been at least one notable failure: An Iranian-made drone struck a U.S. base in Jordan on Jan. 28, killing three U.S. service members. The Post reported that an initial military assessment concluded that the base did not detect the low-flying drone and did not have systems to shoot it down. That was an isolated drone attack. Imagine how the U.S. military would fare against massive swarms of drones. The danger is that the U.S. inventory of drone defenses would be rapidly depleted in a high-intensity conflict against an adversary such as China or Russia — or even Iran.
Indeed, many of the current defensive systems are too expensive to use for extended periods in combat. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, wrote in Foreign Affairs in August that “Iran’s April mass drone and missile strike against Israel cost at most $100 million, but U.S. and Israeli interception efforts cost more than $2 billion.” That’s not a sustainable or winning cost curve. As Jacobsen told me, “Drone innovation is happening at warp speed, but Defense Department acquisition is happening at industrial speed.”
The Pentagon recognizes that it has a problem, which is why it recently unveiled plans for the Replicator 2 initiative. The original Replicator initiative, announced last year, was an urgent effort to field more drones for the U.S. military; Replicator is budgeted at $500 million for this year. Replicator 2, announced on Sept. 27, will focus on rapidly fielding technologies to counter small unmanned aerial systems.
Yet the outlook for Replicator 2 remains unclear; its implementation will be up to the next administration and its funding will be up to Congress. This is an area that needs a big increase in defense spending — which could be paid for in part by cutting back spending on, say, surface warships and other “legacy” systems that will be inviting targets for enemy drones and missiles. Bonzagni suggested to me that the Pentagon should make much better use of the war in Ukraine to develop counterdrone systems by sharing timely information from the battlefield with contractors and facilitating real-time tests of drone defenses against Russian attacks.
It is vitally important that the Pentagon prioritize drone defenses, because drones are rapidly becoming omnipresent in warfare, placing U.S. forces at risk from aerial and naval attack in a way that they have not been since the end of World War II.
Drones, particularly aerial drones (or what the U.S. military calls “unmanned aerial systems”), are all the rage in warfare. Hailed as the new wonder weapon of the 21st century, they are employed in combat by Ukraine and Russia, and by Israel and Hezbollah.
Drones conduct surveillance missions (making it almost impossible for ground forces to advance undetected) and strike missions — either by doing an explosives-laden kamikaze dive at a target or by firing a missile or dropping a bomb. And drones are so cheap and widely available that any armed group in the world can now field its own air force — or its own navy. Ukraine, lacking a conventional navy of its own, used sea drones to disable at least a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and reopen the Black Sea to Ukrainian exports.
In the history of warfare, there is always a lag between offensive innovations and defensive reactions. So, at the moment, defenses against drones are struggling to keep up with their rapidly evolving capabilities, particularly given the constant innovations undertaken by Russian and Ukrainian drone developers and operators. That creates a growing vulnerability for the U.S. armed forces that the Pentagon — one of the world’s largest bureaucracies — is struggling to address.
In late September, the Defense Department announced a new initiative known as Replicator 2 to field drone defenses, but the initiative’s fate, coming at the tail end of the Biden administration, remains uncertain at a time when the need has never been greater.
High-end hardware such as the Patriot surface-to-air missile system is best reserved for taking down cruise missiles, ballistic missiles or enemy bombers: You don’t want to waste a $4 million Patriot missile on shooting down a drone that might cost less than $1,000. But that leaves armed forces around the world, including the U.S. military, scrambling to figure out how to detect and defeat drones, especially smaller, lower-cost drones like the first-person-view models widely used in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Talking with experts in the nascent counter-drone field, I often hear variations on “there is no panacea,” as Chris Bonzagni, a former U.S. Air Force officer, told me. (He is now the founder of Contact Front Technologies, a firm that helps Ukraine to integrate cutting-edge military systems from allies.)
Various acoustic sensors have been developed to detect smaller drones (Ukraine has been using, among other methods, a network of cellphones), and many methods are being developed to intercept them. These include automated Gatling (i.e., machine) guns; small missiles; air-defense drones that crash into other drones or use nets to bring them down; radio-frequency jammers; cyberweapons that can take control of drones; and lasers and high-powered microwave weapons that can zap drones. Some countries have even experimented with using birds of prey such as trained eagles to attack drones — obviously an approach that is hard to scale. In a throwback to the early days of aerial warfare, Ukraine has been deploying its own drones to bring down Russian drones in aerial dogfights. None of these methods is close to foolproof; Ukraine’s top general said in August that his forces were intercepting less than half of Russia’s drones.
Mark D. Jacobsen, a retired U.S. Air Force officer who is now director of research and development at Tilt Autonomy (which develops unmanned weapons systems), emphasized to me the “need for a system of systems, because any one detect-and-defeat modality has real limitations.” In other words, a full-spectrum drone defense requires many different technologies integrated to work seamlessly together — and it has to be done cheaply enough to be scalable against a low-cost threat that is constantly evolving and expanding. Almost every major defense manufacturer (including Raytheon and Northrop Grumman) has entered the market, with some of the most inventive solutions coming from start-ups such as Anduril, Dedrone and Fortem Technologies.
A senior Defense Department official assured me that the Pentagon has been focused on the problem and is making progress. The U.S. military has already fielded directed-energy weapons and other innovative systems against drones. A Joint Counter-Small UAS Office has been set up in the Pentagon, and a Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems University has opened at Fort Sill, Okla., to study and teach drone-fighting techniques. This year, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin set up a departmentwide Warfighter Senior Integration Group to coordinate and accelerate the acquisition of drone defenses among all the military services.
The senior defense official pointed out to me the success that the U.S. military has had in shooting down drones fired by the Houthis in Yemen — including drones aimed at U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea. “We’ve tested and fielded pretty much everything you can think of,” this official told me. “You look at the number of attacks that have been carried out since Oct. 7 [2023] against U.S. forces in Central Command or U.S. ships in the area, and you will see that our counter-UAS systems are working and working quite well.”
No defense is perfect, however, and there has been at least one notable failure: An Iranian-made drone struck a U.S. base in Jordan on Jan. 28, killing three U.S. service members. The Post reported that an initial military assessment concluded that the base did not detect the low-flying drone and did not have systems to shoot it down. That was an isolated drone attack. Imagine how the U.S. military would fare against massive swarms of drones. The danger is that the U.S. inventory of drone defenses would be rapidly depleted in a high-intensity conflict against an adversary such as China or Russia — or even Iran.
Indeed, many of the current defensive systems are too expensive to use for extended periods in combat. Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, wrote in Foreign Affairs in August that “Iran’s April mass drone and missile strike against Israel cost at most $100 million, but U.S. and Israeli interception efforts cost more than $2 billion.” That’s not a sustainable or winning cost curve. As Jacobsen told me, “Drone innovation is happening at warp speed, but Defense Department acquisition is happening at industrial speed.”
The Pentagon recognizes that it has a problem, which is why it recently unveiled plans for the Replicator 2 initiative. The original Replicator initiative, announced last year, was an urgent effort to field more drones for the U.S. military; Replicator is budgeted at $500 million for this year. Replicator 2, announced on Sept. 27, will focus on rapidly fielding technologies to counter small unmanned aerial systems.
Yet the outlook for Replicator 2 remains unclear; its implementation will be up to the next administration and its funding will be up to Congress. This is an area that needs a big increase in defense spending — which could be paid for in part by cutting back spending on, say, surface warships and other “legacy” systems that will be inviting targets for enemy drones and missiles. Bonzagni suggested to me that the Pentagon should make much better use of the war in Ukraine to develop counterdrone systems by sharing timely information from the battlefield with contractors and facilitating real-time tests of drone defenses against Russian attacks.
It is vitally important that the Pentagon prioritize drone defenses, because drones are rapidly becoming omnipresent in warfare, placing U.S. forces at risk from aerial and naval attack in a way that they have not been since the end of World War II.
