A senior Observer Coach/Trainer fires a Dronebuster Electronic Warfare System at the Counter Unmanned Aircraft System Training in the Rotational Unit Bivouac Area on January 30, 2020. (U.S. Army photo by PFC Gower Liu, 11th ACR Public Affairs)
WASHINGTON — Citing the growing threat of unmanned systems in the air, on land and at sea, the Pentagon today unveiled a new, whole-of-department strategy to shore up counter-drone defenses in the near term and to more thoroughly design future forces to fend off autonomous threats.
“These threats are changing how wars are fought,” the Pentagon said in the strategy’s announcement. “By producing a singular Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems, the Secretary and the Department are orienting around a common understanding of the challenge and a shared approach to addressing it.”
The strategy is classified, but its broad strokes were outlined in an unclassified fact sheet provided by the Pentagon today. Calling for a “campaign mindset,” the document sets out five pillars, or “strategic ways,” that the DoD intends to tackle the unmanned threat across different domains at home and abroad.
According to the fact sheet, those are:
- Deepening the DoD’s understanding and awareness of unmanned trends and threats.
- Disrupting and degrading the threat networks that underpin drones.
- Protecting and defending US interests against drone threats.
- Delivering counter-drone solutions more quickly and at scale, including by collaborating with allies and partners.
- Ensuring counter-unmanned capabilities play an integral role in future force designs.
Pointing to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as an attack on an American installation in Jordan that killed three American servicemembers in January, the DoD recognizes an “increasingly urgent and seemingly enduring threat that unmanned systems are posing to our people, to our facilities and to our assets overseas,” a senior defense official told reporters in a briefing today ahead of the strategy’s release.
“The real sort of emphasis of the strategy is to say, as we’re taking on the effects of unmanned systems, we need to think about this temporally,” the official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In the near term, the official said the strategy will focus on boosting counter-drone capabilities with “a particular emphasis on detection,” including by ensuring installations have the active and passive defenses they need. Looking ahead, the strategy intends to “mak[e] sure that we’re developing and designing our future force to reduce vulnerabilities and increase resilience to threats,” the official said.
As other Pentagon officials explained at a recent set of counter-UAS tests dubbed Falcon Peak, convened in the wake of hundreds of drone incursions over DoD installations on US soil, the drone threat can look very different in the homeland — not just because systems in question tend to be small, hobbyist drones, but also because policy constraints can limit commanders’ ability to respond.
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The new strategy is “really trying to make sure that we are making a conscious effort to mitigate the threat in the homeland today in the unique ways in which it manifests in the homeland,” a second DoD official said during the briefing. Going forward, a formal part of the strategy will also ensure commanders and personnel are properly trained and equipped for the homeland defense task, including by educating them on authorities and improving interagency coordination, the official said.
According to the first official, the ongoing initiatives like the Replicator 2 program are “part and parcel with this effort.” Noting that the appropriate type of counter-drone capabilities depends on the operational environment, a third official who spoke with reporters today said that scaling up newer solutions like directed energy “is probably closer to the mid- to long-term” to give officials more confidence in the systems’ performance and then integrate them into a layered defensive approach.
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With the reins of the Pentagon set to switch hands with the incoming Trump administration, yet another official said that “any successor to [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin will undoubtedly have to deal with this challenge, and I think what we’re seeing now is really just the beginning.”
The strategy, therefore, is meant to “lay a foundation for the Department to be able to get after this threat in a way that will be successful and get ahead of the evolution that we’re seeing.”
