Nets, jamming and ‘cyber scalpels’: Pentagon weighs homeland counter-drone tech in mountain tests

FORT CARSON, Colo. — Hovering hundreds of yards away, the small quadcopter drone was nearly invisible to the naked eye, but its size didn’t make it any less of a potential threat to operations on the ground here.

Spotted by sensors, defending personnel dispatched their own drone — this one armed with a net. A few minutes later, in the Colorado air, the friendly drone snagged the interloper, popped a parachute and both floated harmlessly to the ground.

The incident, this time, was not a real threat but a demonstration, part of a series put on by US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to explore ways to counter small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), an increasingly ubiquitous presence not only on the battlefields of Ukraine and the Middle East but lurking around American bases back home. The Pentagon has documented hundreds of suspected drone incursions at military facilities in the last few years, even if many are thought to be the work of hobbyists.

Nets were just one tactic on display during this two-week exercise in October called Falcon Peak, which was limited to non- and low-kinetic mitigation techniques to stop small unmanned aircraft systems, or sUAS. On this Army base here, defense industry firms brought kit tailored to defeat the drones in scenarios where military officials emphasize their options are limited by regulations that protect civilian travel, largely preventing them from using many commonly available but more aggressive kinetic and non-kinetic tools. 

“By all indications, sUAS will present a safety and security risk to military installations and other critical infrastructure for the foreseeable future. Mitigating those risks requires a dedicated effort across all federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal and territorial communities, and Congress to further develop the capabilities, coordination and legal authorities necessary for detecting, tracking and addressing potential sUAS threats in the homeland,” said NORTHCOM chief Gen. Gregory Guillot.

According to a handout from NORTHCOM, representatives at Falcon Peak from industry included Leidos, Teledyne FLIR, Trakka Systems, D-Fend solutions, HGH USA, Fortem Technologies, and ICR. A handful of fielded DoD systems were also brought along. According to a spokesperson for NORTHCOM, “Every participant” in the exercise, whether industry or DoD, “had to detect, track [and] identify sUAS.” Only “some” participants “had the additional ability to mitigate/interdict” a drone threat. 

The vendors set up along a strip of road here near the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain, in an area of Fort Carson called Agony Hill, displaying their systems in demos throughout the Falcon Peak event. During the actual trials, the counter-drone systems were set up along a simulated perimeter of a base and were tasked with tracking and in some cases taking out adversary systems flown by a “red” team, however they could.

‘Before You Shoot Something, You Have To See It’

In countering drone incursions, the first step is knowing that it’s happening at all, and that’s where cutting-edge sensing technology, calibrated to spot small drones, comes in.

“I’m pretty confident in our ability to detect and track” mid-size and large drones, Guillot said in a roundtable with reporters ahead of the visit to Fort Carson. “The purpose of this demonstration is to improve our ability to detect and track” small UAS, he added.

For Falcon Peak, Teledyne FLIR brought along its Cerberus XL system, dragged straight from its debut at the AUSA expo in Washington. The Cerberus XL fuses radar, electro-optical/infrared and radio frequency (RF) sensors to detect and track drones, according to a press release from the company. 

That data can then be fed to different third-party effectors to defeat the drones — in the case of another demonstration, connecting to jammers aimed at taking down offending drones’ datalinks and denying them access to global navigation systems, according to the handout from NORTHCOM. (Breaking Defense did not view it in action.) 

Steve Pedrotty, Teledyne FLIR’s director of US Air Force programs, said in an interview on the sidelines of Falcon Peak that the event was a great opportunity, though he hoped to see the government firm up requirements.

“It’s still kind of early in this cycle” of rapidly changing drone and counter-drone technologies, Pedrotty said. “So honing in on the requirements would help.”

Falcon Peak wasn’t just an opportunity for industry to see if their tech was up to snuff; the event was also a chance for existing DoD systems to make improvements. According to NORTHCOM’s handout, the SUADS — an apparent reference to the small uncrewed aircraft defense system — was among those in attendance, which the handout says uses electro-optical/infrared sensors to sense drones.

“Before you can shoot something, you have to see it,” Jason Mayes, counter-small unmanned aerial systems deputy test director for NORTHCOM, told reporters.

“So that’s why we want to present profiles that those systems have never seen before, and see if we could, from a detection standpoint, beat those systems so that now the services understand you do really good up to this point, but they’re not there yet,” he continued. “So even on that side of the house, they have some homework to go do.”

Taking The Drones Down

Once the drone is spotted, there are myriad ways to try and take it down — even before getting into options like shooting the things out of the sky, which current policy mostly prohibits on US soil. 

On the non-kinetic side, there’s cyber and electronic warfare: either hacking the drone to disable it or take it over, or jamming or spoofing its communications or navigation signals to render it “lost” mid-operation. (Tactics like navigation disruption had to be closely coordinated with the Federal Aviation Administration at Falcon Peak, as any disruption to civilian travel could spell danger to the general public.) 

One example outlined at Falcon Peak was ICR’s “system of systems” called TMX and a specific cyber tool crafted by the company called Bullet.

According to Mike Powell, executive director of counter-UAS at the company, Bullet works like a “cyber scalpel RF system” that exploits the downlink of an adversary device to take it over. 

“There’s no footprint. You’re not going to see it. It is a tiny signal that is only pointed at one drone at a time,” he said. “We can do drones every second. So in 30 seconds, I can control a small swarm of drones with this system” and force them to land at a designated area, return to where they were launched from or force them straight down to earth by turning off rotors. (The Bullet tech was not demonstrated during Breaking Defense’s visit.)

Even then, Powell acknowledged challenges to Bullet’s tactics in light of ever-evolving drone tech. For example, as intense signal interference has dominated the war in Ukraine, drones belonging to both sides have often had trouble reaching their targets. And now, newer systems are on the rise that can offer more resistance to interference, like drones that follow onboard maps rather than GPS to find their targets.

That approach, in turn, makes hijacking drones electronically that much harder, if not impossible. A good radar is needed to sense those threats especially because they don’t emit detectable transmissions, Powell stressed, and a different effector is required to take the drone down. 

“There’s no RF signature. There’s nothing to break into,” Powell said. “That’s the hardest problem.” 

Breaking Defense did not witness any electronic warfare or cyber techniques at the Falcon Peak demo, and a spokesperson for NORTHCOM said although the tactics were used over the course of the event, the “specific number, type, and system is classified.” 

In the low-kinetic realm, there was Fortem Technologies’s DroneHunter, the one armed with a net referenced at the start of this report. In that demo witnessed by Breaking Defense and other media outlets, the system appeared to successfully demonstrate a non-intrusive, low-collateral way to bring down an sUAS threat with little threat to anyone else in the area.

Spencer Prows, executive vice president of solutions engineering at Fortem, explained that the DroneHunter can integrate with other systems or work standalone with the company’s equipment, boasting a towing capacity of about five kilograms. If the intercepted airframe is small enough, DroneHunter can drag its captured quarry back to base, or, as Breaking Defense witnessed, simply bring it straight down to the ground with a parachute if it’s too heavy.

Leidos’s AirShield also played a part in the demo, featuring a spindle-shaped drone effector called the Co-axial Unmanned Guided Autonomous Rotorcraft (CUGAR). It’s designed to take down sUAS by blanketing them with streamers, like ones you’d see at a gender reveal party. But the streamers were never launched in the demo Breaking Defense viewed, as Mayes, the event’s emcee, explained that a target drone was down for maintenance. Sometimes, it’s the enemy’s equipment that fails.  

Capabilities like net capture and streamers do hold promise for defeating sUAS along the lines of hobbyist systems, said Mayes. But the technology is challenged by faster and more agile drones like first-person view (FPV) systems gaining traction in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“They do very, very good with that, because the profiles are fairly steady,” Mayes said of their ability to deal with slower, hobbyist-type drones. “Once you start getting into some of the faster [UAS], like your FPV drones, these racing ones that are 150 to 200 miles an hour, or drones that have been outfitted to be very agile, the systems themselves are not able to keep up with that because of the agility of the other [drones].”

The Question Of Culture

The military is pondering whether its options for taking out drones could expand with the right guardrails — potentially featuring weapons like lasers and microwaves — as it pushes for policy changes that can better accommodate the need to fight off small drones on American soil, a key intergovernmental effort that will be the subject of a future Breaking Defense report.

But at the end of the day, beyond all the complexities of new tech, the counter-UAS problem broadly is a cultural one too. Branches like the Marine Corps have declared plans to equip every squad with the capability to defend themselves against UAS, for example, and any new tactics or technologies will require doctrinal changes — as well as buy-in from troops doing the work.

“It takes time to change doctrine and tactics and techniques and procedures. It takes time for culture and the climate to change,” Command Sgt. Maj. Demetrius Johnson, senior enlisted advisor to the Pentagon’s Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, told reporters when asked what the timeline for a new counter-drone culture might look like.

“It’s still a relatively new threat. And the threat is evolving. Every time the threat evolves, we have to go back to the drawing board and change doctrine and change tactics,” he said. “So it’s going to be ongoing, and I can’t see where there’s an end anywhere in sight.”