Swarm Wars: Pentagon holds toughest drone-defense demo to date

WASHINGTON — With drone strikes in the news from Kyiv to Tel Aviv, the Pentagon’s all-service drone defense program just held its most ambitious field demonstration yet, with up to 50 unmanned aircraft of different types converging on a single target at a time.

“Demo Five really was our most challenging JCO demonstration to date,” said Col. Michael Parent, chief of acquisitions & resources at the Army-led JCO, the mercifully short acronym for Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft System Office.

The JCO demonstrations at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, first held in April 2021, take prototype systems developed by private firms and test their ability to defend against drones. This year’s especially ambitious event focused on repeated swarm attacks, although the details of the scenario were not shared with vendors beforehand. Attacking waves, coming from different altitudes and angles, also included multiple types of drones — fast jets, slower prop-driven drones, and mini-helicopters — ranging in size from under 20 pounds (Group 1 UAS) to over 1,000 (Group 3).

On the defending side, Parent told reporters Tuesday, the vendors’ prototype defense systems all showed a “greater level of maturity” and offered “much better solutions” to the threat than those at previous demos.

Other than that broad brush, however, JCO officials pointedly declined to discuss how well the candidate counter-drone defenses did.

They’re still crunching data from Demonstration Five, which ran from June 3 to June 28 at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. Once done, the first reports will go not to the press, but to military services, combatant commanders worldwide, and to the eight vendors involved — a much larger variety than last year’s five vendors.

Those eight contenders, whittled down from about 60 initial proposals submitted less than a year ago, were a mix of companies small and large: Clear Align, Trakka, ICR, ELTA, Teledyne FLIR, SAIC, ATSC and Anduril. Elta, the North American spinoff of the Israeli armsmaker, submitted two different systems — one vehicle-mounted, the other man-portable — while the others each contributed one.

Instead of being built around a single weapon, most of these offerings were “layered” defenses that combined multiple sensors to detect the drones, which often are too low, slow, and small for radar, and “effectors” to take them down.

All told, across all nine candidate systems, the demonstration featured at least four types of sensors: radars, cameras both electro-optical and infra-red, and radio-frequency scanners. There were also four types of “effectors”: guided rockets, drone-killing mini-drones, machineguns, and radio-frequency jammers. The last is a so-called “soft kill” approach that scrambles a drone’s GPS signal or its command link to its human pilot rather than physically destroying it.

“No one capability, whether kinetic or non-kinetic, in itself could really just beat this kind of [attack] profile,” Parent said. “What we saw was they really do need a full system of systems approach, a layered approach.”

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Interestingly, however, none of the vendors in this demo used “directed energy” weapons, such as lasers or high-powered microwaves. (That said, an HPM weapon was tested in a spinoff event at the same time.)

Even without the proverbial “fricking laser beams,” however, the scenario was complex enough that it was much a test of each defense system’s digital brains as of its physical brawn. The ability to process sensor data, combine different data (such as radars and camera) to identify targets, and assign those targets to weapons was as critical as the firepower and accuracy of any individual “effector.”

“It does challenge everything, to include the command and control,” Parent said. “You don’t want to engage [the same] target multiple times. You’ve got so many coming at you, you’ve got to be able to differentiate and go after the most [dangerous] threat first.”

Once the data is crunched, it’ll be up to the services and COCOMs to decide whether or not to buy one (or potentially more) of the candidate defense system. They’ll base those decisions on each system’s performance, its particular strengths and weaknesses, and their own varying operational needs: DoD is under no obligation to buy any of the demonstrated candidates.

The next JCO demo is expected to happen early in 2025.