Drones 'will play an enormous role' in warfare in the years to come, an expert said.
FILE - Spc. Alexander Mistretta, assigned to 102nd Military Police Battalion, New York Army National Guard supporting 4th Infantry Division, operate the Dronebuster during counter-unmanned aerial systems training near Pabrade, Lithuania, on June 23, 2023.
American troops are learning to disable and then shoot down enemy drones, working to defend against cheap, lethal unmanned aircraft systems that are poised to play a vital role in modern warfare for years to come. The Department of War operates a joint training center for countering aerial threats at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. There, soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines learn how to use handheld systems called the Dronebuster and Smart Shooter. A ground soldier, like someone on patrol or someone guarding an installation, can use the gun-shaped Dronebuster to disrupt a drone using electronic warfare. "It'll start jamming the command and controls, severing that connection between the drone and the operator," instructor Paul Bliefernich said in aBut the Dronebuster freezes the drone, allowing a soldier to use the Smart Shooter, an optic system that attaches to a weapon to control how it fires, to snipe the aerial threat. The students practice by shooting balloons attached to drones. That’s both more cost-effective and more challenging, according to training center officials. "Once the shooter gets toward the end of the training, we'll put up the aircraft and let them shoot at the aircraft,” course supervisor Fred Hill said in the article.Kelly said the Ukrainian army is a fraction the size of the Russian army.“ have basically made the areas around the contact line where the friendly and enemy troops come together extremely lethal. It's very difficult to operate there,” Kelly said. “It's fundamentally changed the way that the warfare is happening in Ukraine. This is a major turning point for how, at least the tactical side of operations, are going to happen across the world, because these are cheap. Terrorist organizations deploy them. Cartels are deploying them. It's fundamentally changing a lot of things.” “I think one of the important things to point out is that the U.S. military would not fight the same kind of war as Ukraine would,” Kelly said.“Nonetheless, the lethality of drones, the ability to do sensing, all those things would remain major opportunities for us, and challenges ... because the other guy would be doing it too in a future conflict,” he said. That’s why it’s imperative for the U.S. to develop both defensive and attack capabilities for drones. Kelly said the U.S. could eventually find it impossible to continue using $100,000 missiles to shoot down $900 drones. The training happening at Fort Sill leverages electronic warfare munitions, which cost almost nothing to use. “So, if you could take down drones with those, then you've solved that kind of cost exchange ratio problem,” he said. “Whether those would be successful in large numbers, that remains to be seen.” Kelly said a lot of the small drones involved in modern warfare are only a foot or so across. Some are used for reconnaissance, and some are strapped with explosives. “Most of these are what's called first-person view, or FPV, drones,” Kelly said. “So, it's essentially, it's a drone with a camera attached to it and an explosive, which the operator just drives into the target.” And drone innovation can move much quicker than traditional U.S. weapons systems, which are expensive and can take years to get online.“And then of course one of the big drives right now, as in many things, is the integration of artificial intelligence into drones, so that it can do kind of smart things at the terminal stages,” Kelly said. “If it's directed towards a target, it can find the target and follow it if it moves, and do things on its own to take on those targets.”
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