DOD creating joint interagency counter-drone task force

The Department of Defense is standing up a joint interagency task force to tackle drone threats, according to a senior officer.

“We recently did a session with the secretary of defense and we are going to stand up a joint interagency task force” focused on thwarting drones, Gen. James Mingus, vice chief of staff of the Army, said during an event Wednesday co-hosted by AUSA and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Counter-unmanned aerial systems (C-UAS), as it is known in DOD parlance, is a key challenge for the military. Commercial technology has evolved in recent years such that drones on the civilian market are extremely cheap to buy and simple to operate. It has also become less challenging to 3D print parts and devices that can fly.

This has made it significantly easier for nation-states and terrorist groups to procure these types of systems and strap bombs to them, allowing adversaries to level the playing field against higher-tech combatants such as the U.S. military.

The C-UAS challenge has existed for about a decade as insurgent groups in the Middle East began acquiring these systems and targeting American troops, marking the first time since the Vietnam War that U.S. service members didn’t have full control of the skies and faced an aerial threat on the ground.

The Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict a few years ago was also a global watershed, serving as one of the first instances where drones helped win a war.

As has been seen in Ukraine, both Kiev and its Russian foes have taken to using first-person-view drones as missiles, turning the battlefield into something more akin to World War I-style warfare where troops are limited in movement due to the risk of being seen and shot on the battlefield.

The Ukrainians have perfecting the use of these capabilities, leveling the playing field against the Russians — whose military was much larger and possessed significantly more firepower — by taking out tanks with FPV drones.

“One junior sergeant in the 47th Ukraine mechanized brigade, he got the Order of the Gold Star and Hero of Ukraine [awards] because he is credited [with] 434 enemy killed, 336 enemy wounded, 42 tanks destroyed, 44 infantry fighting vehicles, 10 tracked amphibs and 20 armored personnel carriers all destroyed in a five-month period. He is a first-person-view drone pilot,” Lt. Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, director for joint force development on the American military’s Joint Staff, said at a special operations symposium hosted by NDIA in February. “That is what he brings — the lethality of about a division. I mean, that is an incredible record.”

Similarly, the Houthis, a group backed by Iran that has controlled portions of Yemen, including the capital, since 2014, have been executing a multi-year on and off again onslaught against commercial and military ships transiting the Red Sea as a protest against Western support for Israel’s war in Gaza against Hamas.

While most of those drones were neutralized, the U.S. military is losing the cost-curve battle by using million-dollar missiles to defeat large numbers of inexpensive UAS.

Mingus equated the C-UAS challenge today to the effort to counter improvised explosive devices during the Global War on Terror. Insurgents began fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq with remotely controlled roadside bombs, to great effect, catalyzing a joint and interagency effort by the United States called the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization. The nation also mobilized with great speed to produce Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, which saved countless lives.

Mingus offered few details regarding the new counter-drone task force, but noted it’s something officials have been advocating for a while.

“We need an organization that is joint, interagency, has authorities, a colorless pot of money and the authorities to go after from requirements all the way through acquisition in a rapid way to be able to keep pace with that. We are in the process of standing that organization up and get it going,” he said. “The Army is going to lead it, but this will be a joint organization to be able to deal with joint solutions in the future. We’ve been trying to advocate this for some time now, and the secretary recently made the decision to allow us to move out on it, because we cannot move fast enough in this space.”

As part of the Army’s budget request this year, it has sought to add a new agile line for C-UAS, along with UAS and electronic warfare, to be able to keep pace with emerging technologies and changing battlefields.

“Once we think we’ve got it figured it out, then the adversary is going to come up with something and we need … to be able to evolve. This is not going to be a static environment. It’s got to be something that’s moving at the rate in which the technology is moving on the other end,” he said. “Instead of like we have done in the past, where we’ll buy a system and buy that same system for 20 years, we’re going to have to have both the flexible funding to go with it and the agility to [acquire] whatever is out there that will deal with the threats today, in the next year. It may be something different. We’ve got to have both the authority and then the funding flexibility to be able to switch to whatever that solution is going to be for the next year.”

Part of the challenge for C-UAS is there isn’t a mature commercial market akin to the UAS market, meaning solutions need to be bespoke and purpose-built.

Mingus said countering drones requires a layered approach.

“No single solution. It’s got to be at every level. It’s got to be layered. Every squad’s got to be able to protect itself, all the way up to formations that provide higher-end capability,” he said. “There’s going to be a multitude of solutions — long, short and close in — that are out there.”

He added that officials want a combination of lasers, high-powered microwaves and interceptors, which will be key to driving down costs.

“Interceptors that continue to come down in cost, so that the price point between shot and what the adversary is doing … has to be in line. We can’t shoot a $130,000 missile at a $1,000 drone. We’ve got to get the price points down. But there’s an interceptor role that’s out there,” Mingus said.

The Army currently leads the military’s Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, or JCO. Mingus on Wednesday did not flesh out what the relationship will be between the JCO and the new counter-drone task force.