[Salon] DRONE WARS Cheap pests can be deadly

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May 8, 2024

DRONE WARS

Cheap pests can be deadly

Goliath has to watch out for David, the Bible tells us. U.S. military leaders are finally starting to believe, too. That’s the bottom line as assorted troublemakers at home and abroad are launching cheap drones and forcing the U.S. and other militaries to seek novel ways to thwart them.

Pipsqueaks seek cheap and effective ways to torment, if not defeat, more powerful foes. One-way drones crammed with explosives are the next generation in this struggle. “That is one of the top threats because it is it is inexpensive; it’s a precision-guided weapon,” Army General Michael Kurilla, chief of U.S. Central Command, recently noted. “Iran produces some that can go over 2,000 kilometers.”

Knocking one or two out of the sky isn’t much of a challenge. “The bigger concern is if you start talking about swarm,” he added. “So we need to continue to invest in things like high-powered microwave to be able to counter a drone swarm that is coming at you.” Just as roadside bombs became the signature weapon of the insurgents the U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, drones are becoming flying IEDs (PDF) for less-well-outfitted fighters.

It’s “getting too expensive” to shoot down drones costing thousands with missiles like the Navy’s SM-2 costing millions, William LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, said last month. The Pentagon is aiming for drone killers costing less than $10,000 a pop. The Defense Department is pursuing high-powered microwaves, lasers, anti-drone rockets, stringy streamers, drone-killing drones, and other technologies to make drone destruction cheaper. “There isn’t a silver-bullet solution out there,” Army Major General Sean Gainey said last fall.

“Downing Iranian-supplied missiles and drones with multi-million-dollar SM-2 missiles to protect shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden is a bad exchange that must change,” is how the U.S. Naval Institute described the May 1 message from Admiral Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Grady said the Pentagon has to swap costly missiles for lasers and microwaves — so-called directed-energy weapons — “where a drop of fuel becomes a weapon.”

And inside the U.S., the Air Force’s No. 2 officer said he is “not satisfied” with the coordination among the U.S. military, the Department of Homeland Security, and local governments to keep drones — what the military calls Unmanned Aerial Systems — away from sensitive sites. “Although the services coordinate effectively together and leverage each other’s capabilities, every single locale has its own story,” General James Slife, the service’s vice chief of staff, saidMay 1. “So there is no national approach to counter this small UAS issue. It is local-issue by local-issue.”

Late last year, unknown drones regularly buzzed Virginia’s Langley Air Force Base. It’s located amid the biggest concentration of U.S. military firepower on the East Coast, including the Pentagon’s hottest F-22 fighters. “While F-22s are the hardest fighters to confront in the sky,” The War Zonenoted in March, “comparatively simple drones could destroy dozens of them as they sit idle on the ground, and do so over great distances.”