Giving Warfighters the Edge Over Unmanned Aircraft

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—from hobbyist quadcopters to high-altitude, military-grade drones—are providing adversaries with a new opportunity for tactical advantage and pose a serious threat to U.S. and allied troops on the battlefield. Outfitted with cameras, sensors, laser designators, radio frequency collection devices, and even munitions, UAS can be deployed to perform reconnaissance and surveillance; provide forward air control; or attack our ground forces, bases of operation, vehicles, local infrastructure, and other military targets—creating fear and havoc on the ground below. And the rapid commercialization of UAS has made them inexpensive and readily available—even to small, poorly resourced adversaries.

Compounding the threat, their relatively small size, composite materials, small radar and electromagnetic signatures, and quiet operation make UAS very difficult to detect, track, and defeat by traditional means. Continued technological advances to UAS are expected to make them even more deadly and more difficult to defend against.

As the threat increases exponentially, vendors and military program managers have rushed to create solutions to address emergent concerns. Unfortunately, most of these proposed solutions involve technologies and approaches tailored for specific threat scenarios, created within isolated military communities, and focused solely on detecting and neutralizing UAS capability.

A more effective approach requires Enterprise Integration (EI) thinking from the outset. Through greater stakeholder collaboration and an open systems architecture, this network view of the challenge considers the perspectives of all affected Department of Defense communities. Broadening the focus beyond the simple detection and neutralization of UAS threats, the EI approach addresses the opportunity—and need—to identify, interrogate, and exploit adversary UAS for critical intelligence, and to pool this intelligence data to reveal broader trends and effective detection and response tactics that can be shared across the military organizations.