Russia has produced over 1.3 million drones this past year on 24-hour shifts in collaboration with Iran, China and North Korea to win a combined cost curve war of attrition against Western democracies. The Axis of Resistance produced drones are doing irreparable damage to civilian infrastructures, military high value targets and lives by overmatch and exponentially forcing an extreme cost of intercept with western missile defense systems to protect high value targets in this modern warfare of attrition. Ukraine especially and Israel to a lesser extent, whom both are constantly under drone and missile attack also have policy restrictions placed on them to not allow them to attack the origins of the drone and missile launch points and even production facilities that are deep in Russia and in Iran. This situation leads to continuous unbalanced conflict that extends in years and favors the attacking nation in attrition.
This exposes vulnerabilities in the Western integrated air and missile defense architecture and has forced adaptive quick solutions to fill those vulnerabilities. The United States has been in combat with defending US and Allied Forward Operating bases in the Middle East for the past two decades from small rockets and drone attacks to have come up with ingenious solutions. The United States created the first Joint Counter Unmanned System Office established by Lt Gen Sean Gainey and put forward top line capabilities to detect and defeat drone and rockets crossing the fence line of operating bases in the Middle East. These systems remain expensive and exquisite, not attritable nor distributable in masses.
As noted by the Wall Street Journal yesterday, swarms of drones have been flying over Langley AFB. The United States Homeland does not have the enough capacity or enough capabilities to defend its own bases in the United States let alone civilian critical power infrastructures in the United States. This remains a glaring gap that is widening as the authorities to take down and detect these incoming drones are not given to the Commanders of these bases and the civilian agencies that oversee the critical civilian infrastructures.
Our nation must invest in cost effective cheap, distributable and atrritable drone defenses to warn, track, detect, negate with the right authorities and directly apply lessons learned from Ukraine and Israel on defending against drones coming across our borders and deep within our homeland. The threat is real and will continue to grow exponentially to the United States. It must be addressed urgently.
Having dual purpose civilian drone defense capabilities and open, accessible C2 architecture outside the US Military Base fence lines is critical to start addressing diametrically opposed perspectives between the DoD and the FAA. The military are biased towards treating these drone excursions as a threat (especially missile defenders with an ‘it flies, it dies’ attitude); however, the national airspace is a permissive environment, adverse to action absent travesty or gross negligent failure.
Regardless of the purpose of these drone excursions, it is absolutely mandatory to address the mechanisms DoD, law enforcement and the FAA share mutual responsibility to detect, classify, track, inform, and if needed, engage for effective and efficient defense for the United States of America and her critical assets.
