New ‘Counter-Drone Strategy’ Unveiled by Pentagon
by Joseph Trevithick and Howard Altman
December 5, 2024
Introduction:
(The War Zone) The Pentagon has released a summary of a new classified strategy to guide efforts to protect American forces abroad and across the U.S. homeland from growing drone threats. This comes as the dangers posed by uncrewed aerial systems have become a national cause celebre due to a number of high-profile incidents. This includes still-unexplained drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base in Virginia last year, as well as more recent incidents in New Jersey and over multiple U.S. facilities in the United Kingdom, all of which The War Zone was first to report on.
The new counter-drone strategy is said to build upon a number of existing efforts, including the establishment of the Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO) in 2020. It is also set to tie into a new Pentagon initiative to help speed up the acquisition and fielding of new counter-drone capabilities dubbed Replicator 2. The first Replicator effort has been focused on getting more uncrewed systems into the hands of U.S. warfighters. In addition, the heads of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) have been given new synchronizer roles to help coordinate counter-drone preparedness (including the training and equipping of relevant forces) and actual responses to incidents.
“Enabled by growing commercial innovation and the increasing sophistication of artificial intelligence (AI), autonomy, and networking technology, unmanned systems are fundamentally changing how militaries of all sizes, capacities, and capabilities – as well as non-state actors – achieve their objectives,” the fact sheet on the new counter-drone strategy explains. “From the Middle East to Ukraine and across the globe – including in the U.S. homeland – unmanned systems are reshaping tactics, techniques, and procedures; challenging established operational principles; and condensing military innovation cycles.”
“At the operational level, these systems are making it more difficult for forces to hide, concentrate, communicate, and maneuver. They allow adversaries to more easily surveil, disrupt, or attack our forces, assets, and installations, potentially without attribution. At the strategic level, unmanned systems provide aggressors with the ability to reduce the initial human, financial, and reputational costs of conflict. The relatively low-cost, widely available nature of these systems has, in effect, democratized precision strike.”
Read more of the
The War Zone article here:
https://www.twz.com/air/the-is-the-new ... -pentagon
Here is a link to the Pentagon fact sheet summary cited in the article:
https://media.defense.gov/2024/Dec/05/2 ... YSTEMS.PDF
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