Drones are not new, the original innovation for the drones of today came from the wars of the 70s, 80s and 90s, direct descendants of the targeting dummies and reconnaissance aircraft of the Cold War. Over the past 50 years, we’ve seen transformational change driven by war; refining technologies that today consumers use all the time – increased autonomy in passenger aircraft, increased connectivity and reliability from global positioning satellite systems (GPS), miniaturization of computing driven by weight and power balancing, and connectivity capabilities that had origins on the battlefield. The needs of yesterday’s battlefield have bled over to the consumer aviation world spurring innovation in the uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) technology industry and dramatically accelerating its growth. We would not have Skydios, Ziplines, Wings, Prime Airs, DJIs, Wingcopters, Matternets or anyone else without the investments and foresight of decision makers 30 years ago. What we’re seeing now, though, is a shift by institutions that embraced large and medium UAS completing a towards a new type of system; a shift that that is being driven in real-time by the war in Ukraine and flashpoints across the globe.
Nothing defines this new reality more so than one drone used in Ukraine to significant success; the SYPAQ CORVO As the SYPAQ specification sheet highlights it’s quick to assemble the drone, composed of a lightweight cardboard-like frame, a propeller unit, and an avionics system which is programmable in the field. The drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds, making it useful for dropping off medicines or ammunition and it has a range of up to 75 miles travelling at over 35 miles per hour. At the cost of less than $4,000 we can begin to see how a unit level; paradigm shift is driven by new technology.
Today, new approaches across the globe are representing a shift away from high altitude, extremely expensive, reconnaissance and weaponized remotely piloted airframes and toward low-altitude, rapidly deployable technologies that can be fielded within a 2-year time. These new investments are intended to be orders of magnitude cheaper, more quickly able to be “reproduced” and fielded, and able to change in response to military exigencies. As Indo-Pacific, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks explained recently, “To stay ahead, we’re going to create a new state of the art — just as America has before — leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains — which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire and can be changed, updated or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”
While investment in airframes is changing, so too are the effective countermeasures. The ability for drones to operate in GPS denied environments, where cellular connectivity is limited or blocked, and where active counter-measures disrupt 90% of today’s command and control linkages is becoming a key goal of developers in response to the only mechanisms that are cost-effective against small drones. Air-defenses on both sides of Russia’s 19-month wider war on Ukraine now include drone-jammers: handheld, vehicle-mounted or mast-mounted devices that fry drones with microwave radiation, scramble the radio signals that link them to their operators or block their satellite-navigation links. As friend and author Faine Greenwood highlighted in her February 2023 article for Foreign Policy, “While Russia’s electronic-warfare systems may not be as infallible as previously assumed, a Royal United Services Institute study published in November 2022 still estimated that the average life span of a Ukrainian quadcopter ran to about three flights, largely due to enemy tactics that either disrupted the drone’s communications or successfully struck the drone pilot on the ground. Ukrainians, too, have taken advantage of tools capable of interrupting consumer drone signals, such as the Lithuanian-made EDM4S anti-drone jammer.”
We are just seeing the beginning of this innovative cycle of cat and mouse, and one that will impact all of our lives soon. While these articles usually focus on safety in the sky, security continues to be a determining factor for where, when, and how drones can operate. This is all a direct outcome of the necessary government procedural changes brought by fourth industrial revolution technologies; defined by more rapid innovation cycles, an increase in the impact these technologies can have across industries, and disruption of existing regulatory structure put in place over the past 100 years. While this innovation continues at a rapid clip, and companies all over the world race to fill the security gap, government entities are rising to the occasion to develop a regulatory environment that can support the evolution and deployment of countermeasures at home.
In the US, The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recently launched the UAS Detection and Mitigation Systems Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) with the objective of providing “… a forum for the US aviation community and UAS security stakeholders to discuss, and provide recommendations to the FAA for, a NAS-wide plan for certification, permitting, authorizing, or allowing of the deployment of technologies or systems for the detection and mitigation of UAS, without causing adverse impact to the NAS.” The hope is that this ARC can identify the latest technology gaps and regulatory frameworks that are needed to protect the US from bad actors without disrupting the safety of the national air space (NAS). Similar initiatives are taking place elsewhere – in late 2022 NATO conducted live testing of counter UAS activities (C-UAS) and recent initiatives driven by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) are moving forward quickly.
The technologies being deployed and finding success on the battlefield today are not the same profile as those of previous generations. The training and other costs of autonomous aviation have come down, the demand for low-altitude countermeasures has gone up and governments across the world are shifting their views to keep pace. As always, war is driving innovation and it won’t be long before civilians across the world are confronted with the threat. I’m optimistic that though the threat posed by small UAS will continue to be a challenge, as we see today in Russia, it is one that will be considered and mitigated through private public partnership.
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