Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS): Make New Friends, Keep The Old

Carter Hitchcock

Special Assistant to CEO

Drone warfare isn’t an emerging threat—it’s the threat. From the middle east to Ukraine to China, nations and groups are rapidly building vast UAS fleets, ranging from off-the-shelf, munition-strapped First-Person View (FPV) drones to cutting-edge Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’s (UAV’s) designed for high-intensity combat.

The threat is so pervasive that even a casual scroll through TikTok or YouTube reveals countless examples of the lethality of one-way drone attacks. Air Force General Kenneth McKenzie, former Commander of U.S. Central Command, has called the rise of small, cheap drones "the most concerning tactical development" since the use of IEDs in Iraq.

In the Middle East, Hezbollah boasts a fleet of around 2,000 highly sophisticated UAVs. Since October 2023, they’ve launched roughly 1,500 surveillance and attack drones towards Israel, with their Iranian-backed arsenal growing more advanced by the day.

The widespread availability of drones allows technologically limited actors to access and effectively utilize unmanned aerial systems for surveillance or one-way attacks. However, it also creates openings for more capable adversaries to exploit them.

China is rapidly expanding its UAS capabilities. As Michael Raska, professor at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, noted, 'China's military is developing more than 50 types of drones with varying capabilities, amassing a fleet of tens of thousands of drones, potentially 10 times larger than Taiwan and the U.S. combined.'

It’s not just UAVs deployed in Europe and the Middle East.

Late last year, the Pentagon confirmed several “Mystery” drones hovering over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia for a period of 17 days. Two months prior, five drones breached restricted airspace and flew over a nuclear weapons testing site in Nevada.

In July, a Chinse graduate student at the University of Minnesota pleaded guilty to violating the espionage act for using a drone to photograph a Naval shipyard containing classified components.

The drone threat isn't a distant concern—it's already here on American soil, and the United States is actively taking steps to counter it.

One example is the DoD’s Replicator Initiative, which aims to field attritable autonomous systems at scale, inspired by lessons learned from Ukraine's use of low-cost, expendable systems to counter Russian forces.

If you haven’t heard the term "attritable," that’s because it’s not a real word. The Pentagon coined it to describe systems designed to be both affordable and expendable. Attritable weapons are low-cost and effective, so they can be sacrificed without significant loss, like a grenade duct taped to a FPV drone.

General Christopher Cavoli, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, is no stranger to countering increasingly sophisticated drone threats in Ukraine.

“They recognized, as we did, pretty quickly, that shooting Patriot missiles against inexpensive drones was not going to be a long-lived way to sustain the war” he said. Clearly, launching a $3 million missile at a drone that might only cost a few thousand dollars does not add up.

Cavoli continued, “We are working hard on getting additional non-kinetic solutions to UAS jammers and things like that, but it's important to remember that you can shoot a UAS down with the cannon on a Bradley too … you can shoot it down with the machine gun.”

One of the most promising solutions comes from Epirus, whose Leonidas system uses Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) microwaves to fry drones' circuits without a single shot. Then there’s Raytheon’s high-energy laser, which can zap drones out of the sky with pinpoint precision.

But as futuristic and intriguing as these systems may sound, we can’t put all our chips in one basket. General Cavoli reminds us that legacy systems—like the M250 machine gun-are proving surprisingly effective in Ukraine. As he puts it, “Legacy systems—dumb artillery, old-fashioned tanks, all the boring things we don’t like to talk about—are producing a lot of results.”

The General’s point highlights a critical concern: as EMP technology becomes more powerful, it poses the risk of a technology plateau. This plateau could occur if EMPs become so disruptive to infrastructure that long-term impacts hinder technological progress, leaving systems unable to advance beyond a certain point.

The possibility of a technology plateau underscores the importance of combat-ready legacy weapons systems, which are often overlooked. So, while it’s exciting to welcome new friends like EMPs and high-energy lasers to the counter-UAS fight, we won’t be walking away from the old ones anytime soon.