Unexpected Measure Will Counter Drone Swarm Attacks

Unexpected Measure Will Counter Drone Swarm Attacks

drone swarm attacks

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Drone swarm attacks have become part of the battlefield in areas of conflict. “Looking at non-state actor drone operations in the last 2-3 years, I would expect to see more efforts to launch swarm drone attacks by non-state groups in the future,” says David Knoll, an analyst at the US Center for Naval Analyses.

“As with the improvised explosive device (IED) fight during the Iraq war, we’re seeing a cat and mouse game between the non-state groups employing drones and the states attempting to counter them. The key difference is that with drones, the commercial sector is driving the rapid development of drone technology. The non-state actors only have to modify the platforms — in many cases not at all — and figure out how to employ them effectively in a military setting,” Knoll told nationalinterest.org.

Countering drones with surface-to-air missiles or interceptor aircraft may be expensive. An alternative cost-effective option might be using an airplane such as Embraer and Sierra Nevada’s A-29 Super Tucano.

During World War 2, Spitfire fighter pilots used to fly alongside and tip the German cruise missiles over with the wings of their fighters. Today’s pilots could apply the same principle to intercepting incoming drones.

A platform like the A-29 or AT-6 might help the US Air Force to use such an aircraft as a defense against swarms of drones in lieu of a $1.8 million AIM-120D AMRAAM launched from an F-22 Raptor or F-15C Eagle.

“The A-29 does have an air-to-air kill against drug runners so it can certainly be used very effectively against that class of target,” Taco Gilbert, Sierra Nevada’s senior vice president for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) evaluated. “It has the ability to go slow like a slow-mover aircraft.” Furthermore, the A-29 is armed with highly accurate .50 caliber machine guns that could quickly dispatch those threats.

Samuel Bendett, another specialist researching drone technology at the Center for Naval Analyses, agreed that swarming drone attack and coordinated drone launches — such as the one that hit Russian forces in Syria recently — will become increasingly common.

The best defense against such attacks is likely electronic warfare (EW). “Robust EW defenses — in fact, the Russians are already talking about bolstering their EW even more following this Syria attack,” Bendett said.

Rather than using a platform such as an A-29 in a kinetic role against UAV swarm, a better use might be to use such an aircraft as a carrier-vehicle for an electronic warfare package.

“Any platform can be outfitted with enough sensors to either track or engage and destroy an incoming UAV of a certain type – after all, the Russians have already mounted an EW system on a small Orlan-10 UAV,” Bendett said. “So using a Leer-3 system as an example — it’s a cellular signal jammer that operates on an Orlan-10 UAV—other technologies can be developed that can be mounted on other airborne platforms.”