US Air Force personnel recently trained on a layered approach to countering drones, using artificial intelligence to spot them, electronic warfare to disrupt them, and shotguns as a last line of defense.
The recent exercise highlights the US military’s growing focus on having a variety of kinetic and non-kinetic systems to defend against uncrewed aerial systems. It’s a work in progress as the different services figure out which capabilities best fit their missions and what lessons can be shared across the force.
Earlier this month, the Air Force’s 31st Air Task Force tested drone defense tactics against small uncrewed aerial systems, connecting different technologies to form a layered defense.
“Through a crawl, walk, run approach, airmen gained practical knowledge of a full spectrum of layered counter-sUAS capabilities,” the 31st Air Task Force’s force protection superintendent said in a news release. “The ATF is posturing to provide tiered defense through detection, electronic warfare defeat, and physical interception of hostile drones.”
During the defensive training, airmen learned how to use AI systems to scan the skies. Those systems helped identify drones while filtering out non-threats like birds and planes. Personnel also trained on other weapons for defending against drones and electronic warfare threats.
As part of the exercise, small high-speed drones mimicked hostile flight patterns, giving airmen the chance to gain experience detecting and tracking realistic targets.
According to the press release, the exercise concluded with a live-fire element in which personnel used kinetic weapons like shotguns as final line of defense against drones.
“The team successfully executed a capstone event that validated new tactics, techniques, and procedures across force protection and distributed communications,” Col. Brad Dvorak, the 31st ATF commander, said in the news release.
“Our mission is to enable airpower operations, anytime, anywhere. By establishing a sUAS instructor cadre, we trained our personnel on counter-sUAS architecture and employed unique solutions for airmen to track, jam, and kinetically defeat sUAS threats.”
The Air Force said it will review the lessons learned from the exercise.
Recent counter-drone training across the US military has pursued a similar layered defense approach, as troops practice detecting, tracking, disrupting, and ultimately defeating drones. Even the exercises not focused specifically on countering drones have sometimes still seen troops carry shotguns or other weapons for close-range defense.
In Ukraine, where drones dominate the battlefield, both sides have fielded a range of drone detection devices and electronic warfare systems for disrupting the radio frequencies used to connect operators and certain first-person-view drones. Some drones, such as fiber-optic drones, are immune to jamming, and in those cases, troops say the best defensive option available may just be a shotgun.
Many Western militaries are still working through best practices for confronting these challenges.
To make counter-UAS capabilities easier to acquire for US operations and give units greater flexibility to choose systems suited to the threat they expect to face, the Pentagon-led counter-drone task force has introduced a new online catalog that military, federal government, and law enforcement personnel can use to assess validated systems — from kinetic weapons to jammers — and submit requests to buy them.
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