US Military Scrambles For Ways To Protect Bases From Drone Warfare

Authored by Andrew Thornebrooke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. military is prioritizing the protection of its bases in the country from drone attacks after Ukraine launched a surprise attack against Russia earlier this month and Israel is suspected of using the same strategy against Iran.

The Ukraine attack destroyed at least 10 of Moscow’s limited supply of long-range heavy bombers, which are a critical component of Russia’s nuclear capability.

Israel is suspected to have smuggled drone parts into Iran and assembled them before using the drones to attack Tehran’s ballistic missile launchers and silos from within.

U.S. military leaders are increasingly concerned that similar attacks, which leverage low-cost commercial drones against expensive weapons systems, could pose a lasting threat to bases and critical infrastructure throughout the country.

However, the Army and other service branches are struggling to design and deploy appropriate technologies to defend bases on U.S. soil, owing to variables that don’t need to be considered in a war zone.

“How we’re going to [defend bases] in a combat zone is very different from how we would do that in the states, obviously,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George said at a House Armed Services Committee on June 4.

One key factor is the Byzantine patchwork of local, state, and federal laws governing drone flights and the military’s own rules of engagement.

Whereas officers at an outpost overseas might simply engage with an unidentified drone approaching their base before any potential harm can occur, the military lacks the authority to engage with drones on U.S. soil, unless those drones directly enter a facility’s airspace.

Even then, options are limited.

The use of kinetic systems that would simply shoot down a drone are out of the question on American soil, according to military personnel, as they are not cost-effective, and would also run the risk of injuring civilians or damaging property when the debris fell to the ground.

That issue highlights the other key factor confounding military planners: A lack of counter-drone systems customized to deal with emergent threats to bases in the United States without endangering civilians.

While the military, and federal government, do have electromagnetic weapons that can knock out drones by interfering with their electrical and navigational systems, these weapons are typically poorly suited to an environment rich in aerial traffic because they affect all electronic systems within a given area.

Such an issue was laid bare on March 1, when more than a dozen flights on final approach to the Reagan National Airport outside Washington received false collision warnings, prompting at least six flights to abort their landings.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) later stated that the false positives were caused by government testing of counter-drone technology near the airport.

Because of that weakness in the system, the Army is now exploring the use of directed energy weapons in its counter-drone operations.

Many such systems, including variants of weapons using lasers, microwaves, and particle and sound beams, are still in development, but they bring their own problems because of high energy consumption.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon’s newest counter-drone weapons would need to draw 100 kilowatts of power to fire a laser in a counter-drone capacity.

That’s more power than the average American household uses in three days, and that figure does not include the additional power requirements for cooling the significant amount of heat generated by such weapons.

It makes defending military installations on U.S. soil from drone attacks an infrastructure problem as well as a defense problem.

New Energy Sources

Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll, who also spoke at the hearing, said the directed energy requirements for defending U.S. bases and supply chains from future drone attacks simply can’t be met with today’s power systems.

“For a lot of the tools that are coming out, directed energy, for example, they have incredible energy requirements,” Driscoll said.

“You’re going to have to have spikes of energy come through the lines that just are not set up. The current technology is not sufficient for it.”

The key to solving the nation’s directed energy issues is in the creation of nuclear microreactors, small modular nuclear reactors that would generate power for an individual base and its weapons, he said.

Driscoll’s push toward nuclear power matches an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month directing the Army to deploy a nuclear reactor at a U.S. base by 2028.

“Advanced nuclear reactors include … small modular reactors, microreactors, and stationary and mobile reactors that have the potential to deliver resilient, secure, and reliable power to critical defense facilities and other mission capability resources,” the order reads.

Read the rest here…