Drones

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In 2017 the Future of Life Institute released a video entitled Slaughterbots. Wikipedia describes it as an:

arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition software to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.

War accelerates technological progress. The war in Ukraine has not yet produced "slaughterbots" but it has greatly accelerated drone technology and taken some giant steps toward them. The most important of these steps is that the cost of precision strike has been reduced by 1-2 orders of magnitude, making it affordable for "non-state actors" and even individuals.

Below the fold I look at drone developments in the war in Ukraine, what is happening with drones and drone defense in the West, and sketch some implications for the future.

In parallel with the military developments I discuss here, there is rapid evolution in civilian drone systems, especially in China, which can be expected to feed into the military space. For example, Arnaud Bertrand describes Pingyin County's low-altitude economy:

The "low-altitude economy" is a big trend in China at the moment. XPeng, one of China's leading EV manufacturers, recently released a low-altitude flying car for instance. Drone deliveries are becoming increasingly common in Chinese cities, and various regions are actively developing low-altitude transportation networks. Shanghai, for instance, plans to establish 400 low-altitude flight routes by 2027.
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this experiment in Pingyin County might seem small, but it could be the beginning of something truly revolutionary. This is China effectively experimenting around becoming the world's first truly three-dimensional economy, with low-altitude transportation and logistics networks. In a decade or two Chinese cities might have as much activity happening in the sky as on the ground.

Ukraine

The drone systems I am discussing here fall into two classes:

• Small systems such as First Person View (FPV) quadcopters, with a range of a few tens of kilometers.
• Larger systems navigating autonomously by GPS or other means with a range of hundreds of kilometers but relatively slow speeds of up to 200Kph.

I am excluding faster systems such as short-range missiles like HIMARS and cruise missiles such as Storm Shadow.

Short Range Drones

The battlefield use of small fixed-wing and FPV quadcopter drones in the class of DJI's Mavic and Matrice has transformed both reconnaissance and strike. They cost a few hundred to a few thousand dollars; for comparison a 155mm shell is around $3K.

Reconnaissance

By Mil.ru, CC BY 4.0, Link

Small drones, such as the Russian Orlan-10, provide an eagle's-eye view of the battlefield with real-time video. They have greatly extended the range of battle field surveillance. With zoom lenses they can provide detail at these longer ranges. With GPS they can provide precise target locations. With thermal cameras they can do all this at night.

These changes have had significant tactical effects:

• Movement within about 20Km of the front line has become much more dangerous. Night is no longer a good cover for movement. This has made logistical support for positions close to the front more difficult. For example:
  

  That has made some sections of the front lines, for example around Siversk in Luhansk province, practically no-go areas for humans. Drones are now responsible for a majority of battlefield losses, overtaking artillery, according to Ukrainian sources.

• Damage assessment has become much easier. Real-time video of strikes can estimate their effects accurately, avoiding wasting ammunition by repeated strikes on targets that have been sufficiently disabled.
• The vast amount of video generated, much of it from drones and the rest from cellphones allows selected clips to be posted to social media used for propaganda and for units to fund-raise. Donations are significant, especially on the Russian side for vehicles, and on the Ukrainian side to support drone manufacture:
  

  The Ukrainian state is buying more than it once was, but voluntary foundations still provide at least a third of all drones used by the army.

• This cornucopia of video fuels an active open source intelligence community and especially their impressive ability to geolocate. It has become much harder for combatants to hide events from the public.

Strike

Kamikaze FPV drones provide sniper-like precision strike, but at vastly longer range, with much heavier warheads, and the ability to access targets that snipers cannot. For example, social media videos routinely show FPV drones striking targets inside buildings or infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) after entering through open doors. The warheads in common use include anti-armor explosively formed projectiles — here is a small FPV drone costing a few thousand dollars demolishing a T-90, the most advanced tank Russia has deployed costing perhaps $3-5M. Note the precision with which the FPV drone strikes the joint between the turret and the hull. And here four FPV drones totaling around $10K destroy a $24M Zoopark radar.

Compare this to the US FGM-148 Javelin with a unit cost of around $250K, a range of less than 5Km and weighing 22Kg. Is one Javelin as effective as 50 FPV drones delivering perhaps six times the weight of warhead at more than twice the range?

There are also many FPV strike drones that are not kamikaze. There are "Dragon drones" that drop burning thermite on trenches or disabled armor. The Wild Hornets drone manufacturer claims their Queen Hornets product:

is a versatile platform capable of mining, bombing enemy positions, delivering supplies, transporting drones, firing an assault rifle or grenade launcher, and relaying communications

Then there is the night bomber drone the Ukrainians call "Vampire" and the Russians Baba Yaga:

The drone is a large hexacopter (6-rotor) drone. It is equipped with an infrared (thermal imaging) camera and able to carry up to a 33-pound (15kg) rocket warhead.
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Baba Yaga was used both as a bomber deploying "mortar-sized munitions" and also as a "mother-ship" drone equipped with a signal repeater, anti-jamming equipment, batteries, and directional antennas. Its ability to function as a signal repeater extended the battery life and range of secondary drones. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the drones have been used primarily at night.

@PStyle0ne1 tweeted video of a Baba Yaga destroying a Russian BUK-M1 air defense system hidden in a forest at night with a precise bomb drop. Drones in this class are also highly effective at laying minefields.

Although Baba Yaga carries the same size warhead as a Shahed 131, there is a huge gap in range and speed. But systems are emerging to fill it, such as one in the video tweeted by @Bricktop_NAFO that converts between fixed-wing and quadcopter in flight.

There are now also specialized drone motherships that carry 4-6 FPV drones and relay their communications, greatly extending their range of action.

ZALA Lancet
Nickel nitride, CC0

On the Russian side the predominant strike drone is the Lancet, a propeller-driven fixed-wing drone costing around $20K with a range up to 40Km. It has been fairly effective until recently (see Defense below), but probably less cost-effective than the much cheaper quadcopter FPV drones.

The Achilles heel of all these drones is their dependence upon radio communication for command and control, which can be both detected and jammed. Worse, the command and control transmitter can be located and attacked; drone pilots are a high-priority target for both sides. This tweet shows the Ukrainians using remotely-controlled directional antennas so to minimize the risk of detection, and the loss if attacked.

Thus both sides have started to deploy drones controlled via a fiber optic cable. David Hambling reports on a Ukrainian version in Ukraine Fields Unjammable Fiber Optic FPV Attack Drone:

Khyzak REBOFF is a new Ukrainian FPV kamikaze drone with fiber optic cable for communication instead of radio. This makes it immune to jamming , the most effective protection against small drones.

Russia has deployed similar technology with the Prince Vandal FPV used in action since August, and which has been lethally effective. However, Ukrainian expert Serhii Flash believes this is a Chinese model which the Russian suppliers rebranded and sold to the military (at a 750% markup), and which was not designed for military use.

The video in this tweet shows that the fiber doesn't impair the FPV drone's remarkable agility. And this tweet from the Russian side highlights the high-definition video characteristic of fiber optic drones. This thread discusses the many advantages fiber optics have over radio in drone warfare. However, replacing radio with fiber adds cost and weight, and reduces range.

The other way to prevent detection and neutralize jamming is to remove the need for a remote pilot by having the drone detect potential targets and select the most valuable autonomously, as implemented for example in the UK's "fire-and-forget" Brimstone missile. Brimstone costs around $130K, over an order of magnitude more than these Ukrainian autonomous drones. They are cheap enough to be used in swarms, as shown in this tweet's video.

The US military reports that:

Attaching infrared and visible light sensors to unmanned systems with onboard object detection and tracking will also increase model performance and targeting effects regardless of illumination conditions. The Ukrainian army is already deploying semiautonomous multirotor drones with onboard edge devices to fly munitions into Russian tanks autonomously.

Max Hunter's Ukraine rolls out dozens of AI systems to help its drones hit targets provides more detail:

Ukraine is using dozens of domestically made AI-augmented systems for its drones to reach targets on the battlefield without being piloted, a senior official said, disclosing new details about the race against Russia to harness automation.

Systems that use artificial intelligence allow cheap drones carrying explosives to spot or fly to their targets in areas protected by extensive signal jamming, which has reduced the effectiveness of manually piloted drones.
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A Ukrainian official told Reuters in July that most first person view units' target strike rate had fallen to 30%-50%, while for new pilots that can be as low as 10%, and that signal jamming was the main problem.

The official predicted that AI-operated first person view drones could achieve hit rates of around 80%.

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These systems are already in action. @GrandpaRoy2 tweeted:

The Russians claim they have recovered a Ukrainian FPV with AI target acquisition and terminal guidance.
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The FPV has a ‘Google Coral AI’ single board computer for machine language development.

That is a $130 add-on. Special Kherson Cat tweeted video of an attack:

The 129th TD Brigade stopped a Russian BTR-82 in Kursk region, and finished it off with FPV with an automatic targeting system

The Odessa Journal's Ukrainians have created an AI for drones that automatically identifies and strikes targets provides more detail:

Our AI system not only recognizes static targets but also performs precise targeting of moving objects at speeds of up to 60 km/h. It can simultaneously track multiple targets and prioritize one for strike
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Unlike traditional computer vision technologies, this system was trained on a specially created database and can recognize seven types of targets: infantry, cars, minivans, trucks, air defense systems, artillery, tanks, and armored vehicles.
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The automatic target recognition range varies from 150 to 800 meters depending on the object type, with the maximum targeting range being up to 1000 meters. The system can be installed on any type of FPV kamikaze drones, including multicopters, wings, and airplanes. It is equipped with its own camera, connects to the flight controller and standard VTX, and drone control is done via a standard remote.

According to the interview, the system costs about $50 more than traditional targeting systems.

The Economist's How Ukraine uses cheap AI-guided drones to deadly effect against Russia agrees with this cost estimate:

Yaroslav Azhnyuk, the founder of The Fourth Law, says that his own “autonomy module” is around $50 to $100 per unit for Ukrainian customers buying thousands of units.

The cost-benefit ratio of adding AI is reportedly considerable:

Data from the battlefield suggest that the hit rate for these AI-guided drones is currently above 80%. That is higher than the rate of manually piloted drones. As important, the training burden declines dramatically. Mr Liscovich notes that, although there are now more highly experienced drone pilots, some with thousands of hours of flying time, the average quality of Ukrainian personnel has fallen over time as less motivated people are conscripted. “We can train an operator within 30 minutes and the quality of the engagement doesn’t depend on their piloting skills,”

With feedback from use in combat, the performance of these systems is improving rapidly:

Rudimentary object-recognition software has been in use, on both sides, for over a year. But it is getting better. Lorenz Meier of Auterion, a Switzerland-based firm, says that between spring and summer his firm’s software, known as Skynode, managed to double the range at which a drone could engage a target, from 500 metres to 1km or so. He says that improvements in the resolution of images captured by drones have since increased that further. The Economist understands that AI systems are sometimes locking onto targets at perhaps double that distance, far beyond the range at which basic jammers could take out the drone.

The innovation cycle is accelerating:

Mr Meier reckons that fewer than a tenth of drones are AI-guided at present. But that number is rising. Ukraine’s innovation cycles are relentless, with feedback loops in some cases down to a few days. The simplicity of FPV drones, which Ukraine builds from off-the-shelf components, can also act as a hindrance: it makes them easy to replicate. One manufacturer says Russian reverse engineering can be as quick as three weeks, but encryption means that the software can be protected from copying.

These autonomous systems are still vulnerable to jamming before they get close enough for the AI to recognize the target. Some idea of the intensity of the electronic warfare in Ukraine can be gained from Charlie Metcalfe's Meet the radio-obsessed civilian shaping Ukraine’s drone defense:

Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov hates going to the front line. The risks terrify him. “I’m really not happy to do it at all,” he says. But to perform his particular self-appointed role in the Russia-Ukraine war, he believes it’s critical to exchange the relative safety of his suburban home north of the capital for places where the prospect of death is much more immediate. “From Kyiv,” he says, “nobody sees the real situation.”

So about once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches.

He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers—including many soldiers and government officials—on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night—one of which was flying directly above his van.

@GrandpaRoy2 reports that:

Both sides in Ukraine are developing video frequency channels lower than the standard 5.8GHz.

The Russians are using technology from satellite TV dishes to make a 3.3GHz video channel for their fixed-wing reconnaissance drones.

Ukrainian drone units have developed an analog video board for their FPVs at 1.2GHz, to escape interception and monitoring by the Russians.

Here is a thread discussing the hand-held drone detectors snooping on the drones' video channels.

How CRPA works

Since the longer-range drones navigate using GPS or the Russian GLONASS, they are vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. Sophisticated Controlled Reception Pattern Antennas (CRPA) can filter out the jamming signal:

The CRPA antenna exploits the fact that a GPS satellite signal and a ground based jamming signal arrive from different directions. It consists of an array of antennas that measure the direction and time of arrival of different signals

CRPAs can be enhanced with algorithms to defend against spoofing, but they are only partly effective:

Cometa CRPA

Recently Russian Shahed drones have been ‘spoofed’ when their global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) received Ukrainian false coordinates that resulted in them flying back to Russia and Belarus . The “Cometa” GNSS is resistant to jamming, but vulnerable to spoofing.

The Cometa CRPA (Controlled Reception Pattern Antenna) GNSS was upgraded this year to a jam-resistant 8 antenna array, but is obviously still vulnerable to spoofing.

Because both reconnaissance and strike drones are expendable, mass production is critical. The Ukrainian Review reports that:

For 2024-2025, MoD have already contracted 1.8 million drones for almost UAH 147 billion.

Long-range drones, FPV, reconnaissance copters, aircraft-type UAVs, attack copters.

Another 366,940 drones are planned to be delivered by the end of 2024.

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One essential component of the short-range drones is their battery. David Hambling reports that Ukraine Shows U.S. How To Beat China In Drone Battery Wars:

Most drone batteries are made in China, which is why the Chinese government was able to pull the plug on battery supplies to U.S. military drone maker Skydio last month.

Skydio CEO Adam Bry reassured customers that they would quickly find an alternate source, but warned that for the next few months Skydio X10 batteries would be rationed — one per drone.
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While not all cells are created equal, they are essentially commodity products manufactured by the billion. They’re made mainly by big players in the Far East; China dominates but it does not have a monopoly. Other sources are readily available.
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To build your own drone batteries, you have to source quality cells from a reliable supplier and assemble them into battery packs. And that is exactly what Ukrainian drone maker Wild Hornets has been doing for some time.

A video on social media explains Wild Hornets' process. The building blocks for its battery packs are Samsung 50S, which are optimized for high-power applications and have a respectable 5000 mAH capacity.

FPV drones may be relatively cheap, but a war consumes them at an enormous rate. The technical problems can be solved but the financial ones are harder:

Last month, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a speech his country had produced 1.5 million drones so far this year, far short of an annual manufacturing capacity of over 4 million. All that was lacking is the money to buy them all.

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Lessons from Ukraine are being learned world-wide, and innovation proceeds elsewhere. For example, here is video of the Syrian rebels using a rocket-powered fixed-wing FPV drone, or rather a ground-launched FPV glide bomb. The picture is of one downed in action a year ago. Note that the Ukrainian HUR was known to be active in Syria before that.

Longer Range Drones

Shahed 136
Alexpl CC BY 4.0

The typical longer-range drone in Ukraine is a small, propeller-driven fixed-wing aircraft, such as the Iranian Shahed, used by the Russians in large numbers:

• The Shahed 131 is 2.6m long, spans 2.2m and has a range of 900Km with a 15Kg warhead.
• The Shahed 136 is 3.5m long, spans 3.5m and has a range of 2500Km at 185Kph with a 50Kg warhead.

There are also larger drones up to the size of small light aircraft, which the Ukrainians have used for raids such as the recent 34-drone attack on Moscow.

Marc Champion's Above Ukraine, a Sky Full of Drones Is Changing the War describes one of these larger drones:

In Ukraine, hundreds of new drone manufacturers sprung up to meet demand. One of them, FP (formerly named Fire Point), was founded by a group of Ukrainian movie producers and businessmen and released an unmanned mini plane in the summer of 2023. FP’s drone can fly 1,000 kilometers at up to 205 km per hour, carrying 60 to 100 kilograms (130 to 220 pounds) of explosives. Ukrainian forces have so far used them to strike six airfields, two arms depots and a naval base in Russia, according to the company.

HX-2

As with FPV drones, AI is being applied to longer-range drones. For example, the German company Helsing is apparently planning to ship Ukraine 4000 of its new HX-2 drone:

This kamikaze drone has a range of up to 100 km and weighs about 12 kg and a speed of up to 220 km/h

The main feature of the HX-2 is its integration with advanced machine vision algorithms, which provide autonomous target recognition and their destruction even with active electronic warfare.

This is similar to Brimstone's capabilities but slower, smaller, longer-ranged and much cheaper.

Again, the most important aspect of these developments is that they greatly reduce the cost of precision strike :

Ukraine’s new drones are also cheap. A kit of 10 Fire Point drones plus a control station and transport, including three mobile trailers, costs $580,000. That’s a fraction of the cost of military drones produced by western arms manufacturers, though it’s still a stretch for Ukraine’s military budget. FP says it can produce at least 500 drones per month, but that Ukraine’s defense ministry struggles to buy a fifth of that.

Drone Defense

The essential feature of a successful defense against either the short- or the longer-range drones is that it be cheaper than the attack. This is rapidly decreasing, making cost-effective defense challenging.

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One of the effective anti-Shahed systems in Ukraine is pickup trucks mounted with machine guns such as the Browning M2 and improvised thermal sights. The Browning M2 is a remarkable weapon. It dates from World War 1 and:

"It is the primary heavy machine gun of NATO countries and has been used by many other countries as well. U.S. forces have used the M2 longer than any other firearm except the .45 ACP M1911 pistol, which was also designed by John Browning.

This tweet has video of one of them downing a Shahed 136.

Yak-52 and kill

Along similar lines is the 1970s Yak-52 armed with a shotgun which defends Odesa:

The Yak-52, which costs mere hundreds of dollars per flight hour, presents a cost-effective solution against drones valued around $100,000. In a remarkable three-month period starting May, the aircraft reportedly shot down at least a dozen Russian drones, with increasing kill markings documenting its effectiveness,

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All drones emit heat, and the sky is generally a fairly even temperature looking up at it so the passive thermal sights are effective. The pickups and the Yak-52 rely on a nationwide passive acoustic sensor system built from cell-phones, using machine learning to identify drones acoustic signatures. It is called Sky Fortress:

Over a field east of Poltava, the sound of a 4-cylinder piston engine rumbles through the quiet of the night. A small electronic box attached to a cell tower records the sound, identifying the audio profile of a Geran-2 loitering munition, and transmits the data for processing. Responding to an alert, two soldiers fire up the engine on their Nissan pickup truck and go speeding down the road to the grid coordinates provided. In position, they scan the horizon in the direction of the attack. They have only a narrow window of opportunity. Tracers arc into the sky from their old but reliable DShK, their efforts rewarded as the drone disappears in a fireball.

Zipline drone

Shaheds and quadcopters are quite noisy, but Zipline, the South San Francisco autonomous drone delivery company, has made remarkable progress in rotor design to reduce the noise signature, as Mark Rober demonstrates in this video.

Inevitably, FPV drones started to be used to counter FPV drones. Here, for example, a kamikaze FPV drone intercepts an enemy FPV drone.

Ukrainian FPV drones have been extremely effective against Russian reconnaissance drones. The video in this tweet documents the loss of 406 assorted Russian reconnaissance drones.

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This summer the Ukrainians launched a campaign to use FPV drones to intercept Lancets. As the graph shows, this has caused a remarkable reduction in the number of Lancet strikes.

It isn't necessary to use kamikaze drones in the fighter role. Both sides are now using FPV drones as net launchers, entangling rotors or propellers to bring their targets down.

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Artem's The Ukrainian Defense Forces intercepted more than 850 drones of the “fixed-wing” type is a painstaking analysis from open sources:

these models can be further categorized into either ‘reconnaissance’ or ‘strike’, with 11 reconnaissance models and 3 strike models, of which 850 and 20 were intercepted,
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It should be noted that this study does not include examples and video footage of Russian FPV interceptions; we note that the presently recorded ratio is 870:8 in this regard.

Note that this analysis confirms the effectiveness of the drone interception campaign but shows it started in late August.

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When all else fails, the one remaining option is to accept that the drone will reach the target but armor it so that it, or at least the crew, survives to fight on. The Kyiv Post describes the evolution of armored vehicles to counter the drone threat in From Sublime to Ridiculous – Russia’s T-80 ‘Super Turtle Tank’:

In mid-2023, faced with the ever-growing threat from Ukraine’s first-person view (FPV) kamikaze drones, Russian tanks and armored personal carriers (APCs) began being fitted with so-called “cope cages” aimed at limiting the impact of attack.

Initially these took the form of improvised crude grills, frames and screens to protect their turrets and other vulnerable parts. Over time, the cages became bigger, eventually covering most of the vehicle, with reports that anti-drone grills were being fitted to newly built tanks and APCs in the factory. They also started to appear on Israeli tanks moving against Hamas in Gaza.

In early April this year, Russian troops, seemingly concerned that their improvised and even factory-fitted grills weren’t providing adequate protection, began supplementing their cages with armored boxes covering the whole tank

The West

The rapid evolution of drone technology is posing significant problems for Western nations. Drones are already being used to surveil defense assets with impunity, because neither suitable defense systems nor appropriate policies for their use are in place.

Drone Incursions

Shahed drone

Three weeks ago Gordon Lubold, Lara Seligman and Aruna Viswanatha of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Mystery Drones Swarmed a U.S. Military Base for 17 Days. Pentagon Is Stumped:

U.S. Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly wasn’t sure what to make of reports that a suspicious fleet of unidentified aircraft had been flying over Langley Air Force Base on Virginia’s shoreline.

Kelly, a decorated senior commander at the base, got on a squadron rooftop to see for himself. He joined a handful of other officers responsible for a clutch of the nation’s most advanced jet fighters, including F-22 Raptors.

For several nights, military personnel had reported a mysterious breach of restricted airspace over a stretch of land that has one of the largest concentrations of national-security facilities in the U.S. The show usually starts 45 minutes to an hour after sunset, another senior leader told Kelly.

The first drone arrived shortly. Kelly, a career fighter pilot, estimated it was roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.

The drones headed south, across Chesapeake Bay, toward Norfolk, Va., and over an area that includes the home base for the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Naval Station Norfolk, the world’s largest naval port.

Given the incredible lethality of drones in Ukraine, this seems like a problem. The WSJ story provided more details:

Over 17 days, the drones arrived at dusk, flew off and circled back. Some shone small lights, making them look like a constellation moving in the night sky—or a science-fiction movie, Kelly said, “‘Close Encounters at Langley.’” They also were nearly impossible to track, vanishing each night despite a wealth of resources deployed to catch them.

Gen. Glen VanHerck, at the time commander of the U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, said drones had for years been spotted flying around defense installations. But the nightly drone swarms over Langley, he said, were unlike any past incursion.

The swarms were clearly a sophisticated operation:

U.S. officials didn’t believe hobbyists were flying the drones, given the complexity of the operation. The drones flew in a pattern: one or two fixed-wing drones positioned more than 100 feet in the air and smaller quadcopters, the size of 20-pound commercial drones, often below and flying slower. Occasionally, they hovered.

They came from the north around 6 p.m. to traverse the base, which sits on a peninsula at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, and continued south, beyond the reach of radar. They repeated the pattern and then disappeared, typically by midnight.

Shaheds do sound like lawn movers, fly around 100mph, and have the endurance to fly several circuits of Langley between 6pm and midnight. General Kelly might have over-estimated the length; the fixed-wing drones may have been Shahed 136 equivalents. The map shows the vast area from which a Shahed 136-class drone attack on Langley could be launched.

In Here’s What NORAD’s Commander Just Told Us About The Langley AFB Drone Incursions Howard Altman reports that General Guillot:

offered few specifics about the incursions but talked about some of the steps NORTHCOM is taking in the wake of those incidents.
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Replying to our question, Guillot told us he did not know if they were tracked back to their recovery point or whether they could have been launched by a vessel off the coast.

The Langley incursions were among more than 600 reported over U.S. military installations since 2022, NORAD stated Tuesday. In the wake of the rash of drone activity over Langley AFB, NORTHCOM was tasked by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to look at drone incursions across the U.S., Guillot said.

But these drones weren't their problem:

“I saw that NORAD’s responsibility for countering UAS was very limited to something that would be an attack of national consequence,” he explained not the small drones as seen over Langley and elsewhere. NORTHCOM, meanwhile, has no responsibility or authority to take action, because the services are charged with securing their facilities.

Altman explains that the Dept. of Defense has had their head in the sand about the threat for years:

As we have frequently reported, there have been unidentified drone incursions for years over U.S. military installations, warning areas, and critical government facilities. Among them were a very similar repeated rashes of claimed drone sightings in Colorado in 2020 in an area where many of America’s ICBMs are based. Another took place at the Palo Verde nuclear facility in Arizona in 2019.

Also in 2019, drones swarmed over a U.S. Navy exercise taking place 100 miles off the coast of California, raising concerns that an adversary was trying to suck up critical intelligence, including very sensitive electronic and signals emissions of America’s most advanced air defense and command and control systems.

More recently, we were the first to write about drone flights over the highly-secure Plant 42 in Palmdale California that were so concerning a temporary flight restriction was issued for the airspace over the facility.

Using FOIA requests, The War Zone's Jospeh Trevithick, Adam Kehoe and MARC Cecotti have revealed similar reports dating back to 2016. The Press Association's Unidentified drones spotted over three UK airbases, US air force confirms makes it clear this isn't just a US problem:

Unidentified drones were spotted over three airbases in Britain used by the US air force (USAF)

“Small unmanned aerial systems” were seen between 20 and 22 November over RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, and RAF Feltwell in Norfolk.

And also:

A mystery drone was seen trailing HMS Queen Elizabeth, the British aircraft carrier, as it entered the port of Hamburg, in Germany, on Friday

These incursions are continuing.

In some cases the source of the drone incursions is obvious. Since at least 2017 non-state armed groups (NSAGs), such as Mexican drug cartels, have acquired greatly enhanced strike and reconissance capabilities. For example, Rio Grande Valley Sector Chief Patrol Agent Gloria Chavez testified that:

in the Rio Grande Valley sector of Texas alone, Border Patrol has faced over 10,000 drone incursions and 25,000 drone sightings in just one year.

An academic study of this problem is Narco drones: tracing the evolution of cartel aerial tactics in Mexico’s low-intensity conflicts by Ghaleb Krame, Vlado Vivoda and Amanda Davies,which:

examines the evolution of drone tactics employed by drug cartels in Mexico from 2017 to 2022. The research traces the increasing sophistication of drone technology, payload capacities, and adaptability of cartels in employing airborne drones in low-intensity conflicts.

Note that this research does not include developments driven by the Ukraine war. The rapid cost reductions in drone technology since likely mean much greater use of drones by criminal organizations.

Drone Defense: Systems

General Guillot outlined his approach to drone defense:

“I think there’s certainly a role for fighters. There’s a role for non-kinetic or low-collateral kinetic capabilities that would be at the smaller end. And then I’m a big proponent for advances in directed energy, laser and high power microwave. So those non-kinetic capabilities that bring a kinetic result of bringing down the systems, and I think it has to be layered in today’s today’s threat.”

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Indeed, the DoD's Palletized High Energy Laser Program has produced a laser counter-drone system, the BlueHalo LOCUST Laser Weapon System. The WSJ reported on it in this video.

One of the big problems with cheap drones is that you need to shoot them down even more cheaply. LOCUST touts a per-shot cost of just $3, but that isn't the end of the story. Each LOCUST costs $10M. "fewer than a dozen are deployed", all overseas. Each requires a dedicated team from BlueHalo to maintain it because there are no stocks of spare parts. And "the Pentagon has not confirmed that a laser has taken down a drone in combat". It weighs 3400lb and fits in a 7' cube. It takes "as many as 15 seconds to melt a target".

Despite the low per-shot cost, LOCUST isn't a solution to the rash of drone swarms. First, at a unit price of $10M plus a dedicated support team defending the vast number of US defense assets isn't affordable. Second, the problem isn't defending against a single drone, it is defending against a swarm of cheap drones. For example, Ukraine used at least 34 drones in their November 10^th attack on Moscow. Lets guess that Locust can switch targets in 5 seconds, and is 100% lethal in 15 seconds, it would take 11:20 to defeat the swarm. It isn't going to have that long, because at 100mph that is 19 miles. So even if 34 was the biggest feasible swarm (hint: it isn't) defending a high-value asset would need say 5 LOCUST systems at $50M capex plus opex.

Drone Defense: Policy

Neither the pickups with the Brownings nor the cellphones are systems the DoD's supply chain is interested in building. But even if systems like LOCUST could be afforded and deployed, policies need to be established for their use. Joseph Trevithick, Howard Altman and Tyler Rogoway's Lasers, Microwaves, Missiles, Guns Not On The Table For Domestic Drone Defense is a deep dive into the policy issues:

Even if counter-drone policies are clarified and solidified, and authorities get expanded, there are still other concerns at play, especially when it comes to collateral damage. Shooting something down with a gun-based system or a surface-to-air missile carries inherent dangers of projectiles or interceptors, or debris from them, falling onto innocent bystanders below. The aforementioned Centurion C-RAM fires specialized self-destructing ammunition to reduce these risks.

Here, for example, is an Oerlikon Revolver in Ukraine firing air-burst ammunition. But the ammunition isn't the only problem:

The drone, or what is left of it, which could include undetonated explosive warheads or other potentially hazardous payloads, would also fall to Earth in an uncontrolled manner after any such engagement.

The Russians frequently explain burning oil refineries and similar mishaps on debris from successful interceptions of drones. Someone whose house was destroyed by the 50Kg warhead of a shot-down Shahed 136 would have reason to be upset. Deciding on a suitable counter-drone policy is complex:

Maybe even more importantly is that these weapons do fail and they are packed with high explosives and traveling at high speed, which could cause very unpredictable harm to people and property in a large potential impact area. Then there is the idea that you have to know exactly what you are shooting at, and that can be harder than it sounds when dealing with strange objects in the sky, especially in populated areas where civilian air traffic is dense. Making the call to shoot down an object over the U.S. is an incredibly complex task that never actually occurred until recently.

Tower 22

But even in war zones where the US policy is clear and permissive, it isn't foolproof. Stefan Becket and Kaia Hubbard reported on a January incident at Tower 22 on the border with Syria in 3 American service members killed and dozens injured in drone attack on base in Jordan, U.S. says:

Three American service members were killed and dozens more were injured in an unmanned aerial drone attack on a base in Jordan on Sunday, President Biden and the U.S. military said.
...
Mr. Biden said the attack happened at a base in northeast Jordan, a U.S. ally, close to the border with Syria. A U.S. official said the attack occurred at an outpost known as Tower 22, where roughly 350 U.S. Army and Air Force personnel are deployed, according to the Department of Defense.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees forces in the Middle East, initially put the number of injured at 25, but two U.S. officials soon said that figure had risen to more than 30. CENTCOM confirmed later Sunday night that at least 34 had been injured. Eight of the wounded service members had to be evacuated — some were in critical condition but all were stable, a defense official told CBS News.

How was the drone able to penetrate US defenses and kill or injure more than 10% of the base occupants? Drone that killed US soldiers in Jordan followed American drone onto base, causing confusion by Natasha Bertrand, Oren Liebermann and Haley Britzky explains:

The drone that killed three US Army soldiers and wounded dozens more in Jordan on Sunday approached the US military outpost, Tower 22, around the same time an American drone was returning to the base, which led to uncertainty over whether it was hostile and caused a delay to the US response, two US officials told CNN.

The enemy drone followed the American drone as it approached, but it is not clear whether the enemy drone intentionally followed the American one or if it was a coincidence, one of the officials said.

These problems don't go away if the counter-drone technology is electronic. Confusing the drone's navigation with GPS spoofing or detaching an FPV drone from its pilot using a jammer may prevent it reaching its target but it doesn't render it harmless to innocent bystanders.

The Threat

One notable feature of the war in Ukraine is Russia's sustained campaign against Ukraine's electric grid, which has caused major difficulties especially in the winter. On November 26^th Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted:

Last night, Russia attacked Ukraine, launching a record number of strike drones—188—against our people. I want to thank our defenders of the sky for repelling the attack. Around 80 drones were shot down, and more than 90 were lost due to location disruption.

Unfortunately, there has been damage to our critical infrastructure, and the situation in Ternopil remains challenging. All services and repair crews are on-site, doing everything to assist people and restore electricity as quickly as possible.

A mysterious feature has been Ukraine's reluctance to attack Russia's electric grid, especially since their economy and military are completely dependent upon freight trains hauled by electric locomotives. This may have been part of the US' "escalation management".

If whoever is behind the drone incursions in the West decides to switch from reconnaissance to strike, they are likely to follow the Russian example and strike the grid by attacking the transformers. US transformers have already been shot and damaged by unknown attackers, presumably right-wing militia. FPV drones would cause far more than the $15M damage in that attack. Large grid transformers are expensive, long lead-time items, completely defenseless against drone attack. A coordinated attack on a number of them would have a major, long-lasting impact on the US grid, similar to a major coronal mass ejection.

The Future

The cost of precision strike, both at short and longer ranges, has been reduced by at least an order of magnitude and likely much more. Further reductions are very likely. Typically, when the cost of something is greatly reduced, you get a lot more of it. What is likely to be the effect of greatly increasing the supply of precision strike?

The impact of precision strike technology on the warfare of non-state armed groups: case studies on Daesh and the Houthis by Max Mutschler, Marius Bales and Esther Meininghaus examines one effect that has already happened:

Precision strikes from a distance are a common practice of state warfare. However, the global proliferation of precision strike technologies, like missiles and armed drones, makes such weapons progressively available to non-state armed groups (NSAGs). We look at Daesh in Syria and Iraq and at the Houthis in Yemen as two case studies to analyse the consequences of this proliferation for non-state warfare.

The Houthis, with help from Iran, have used precision strike systems much more sophisticated than the ones I deal with here to cause a major disruption to world trade, and to cause Western nations to expend vastly more expensive systems in a futile attempt to stop them.

The war in Ukraine spawned hundreds of new drone manufacturers. This incredibly competitive market has driven costs down to a point where groups with far less funding than the drug cartels, and even individuals, can acquire precision strike capabilities. In the US civilian use of drones is currently regulated by the FAA. Drones are required to be registered and the areas where they are permitted to fly are restricted. They are not regarded as weapons, but what does the 2^nd Amendment say about drones if they are regarded as weapons?

Many of the same policy issues arise when it comes to individuals defending themselves against drone attacks. Electronic defenses such as jamming and GPS spoofing are illegal. "Kinetic" defenses such as shotguns are legal in some cases, but restricted by the risks to bystanders. Passive defenses such as "cope cages" on vehicles would be illegal under safety regulations, and on houses by planning regulations.

Potential future technological developments may greatly increase the difficulty of defending against drone attacks by making it impossible to interfere with their navigation. Current high-end cruise missiles such as Ukraine's R360-Neptune use inertial navigation, but because it drifts over time it requires regular updates from GPS to maintain accuracy. This is similar to the navigation systems in commercial aircraft. These systems are too large and expensive for drones.

Source

But, as Sandia Labs announced in Revolutionary Quantum Compass Could Soon Make GPS-Free Navigation a Reality dramatic increases in accuracy and reductions in cost and size for inertial navigation are on the way:

Now, scientists are attempting to make a motion sensor so precise it could minimize the nation’s reliance on global positioning satellites. Until recently, such a sensor — a thousand times more sensitive than today’s navigation-grade devices — would have filled a moving truck. But advancements are dramatically shrinking the size and cost of this technology.

For the first time, researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have used silicon photonic microchip components to perform a quantum sensing technique called atom interferometry, an ultra-precise way of measuring acceleration.
...
Besides size, cost has been a major obstacle to deploying quantum navigation devices. Every atom interferometer needs a laser system, and laser systems need modulators.

“Just one full-size single-sideband modulator, a commercially available one, is more than $10,000,” Lee said.

Miniaturizing bulky, expensive components into silicon photonic chips helps drive down these costs.

“We can make hundreds of modulators on a single 8-inch wafer and even more on a 12-inch wafer,” Kodigala said.

Source

Quantum inertial systems for commercial aircraft are undergoing flight tests in the UK and the US. The image shows the unit Boeing is testing. Mentour Pilot's video provides an accessible introduction to the technology.

Even with Sandia's progress in reducing the size and cost of quantum intertial navigation, the technology is currently far out of reach for low-cost drones. But if progress were to continue it would mean that a drone, or more likely a drone swarm, could navigate to any target whose coordinates were known without using any external assistance that could be jammed or spoofed. Electrical grid transformers would be one such target.