Anti-drone ‘shoot-out’ lets experienced soldiers wring out latest gear

Manufacturers of counter-drone gear got a rare chance this week to show off their wares and get feedback from U.S. soldiers who’ve had to fight off enemy drones overseas.

They gathered from July 31 to Aug. 8 in Fort Drum, New York, bringing everything from small arms to directed-energy weapons to “Operation Hard Kill,” a shoot-off organized by the 10th Mountain Division and the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, or DEVCOM.

“You can't fake it with our soldiers,” said Maj. Anthony Padalino, a 10th Mountain Division field-artilleryt officer with experience against drones in Iraq. “They've actually lived it when systems didn't work, when drones impacted their base.”

The 10th Mountain is one of the few conventional Army units that, since 2020, “consistently deploys in support of Operation Inherent Resolve,” the counter-ISIS effort in Syria, according to an Army public affairs officer. Many troops deployed there have fought off drone attacks, with several becoming five-kill anti-drone aces. But sometimes, the aerial weapons still get through. In January, three soldiers died in Jordan and 40 more were injured in a drone attack. 

The event drew some troops freshly returned from deployment, and some getting ready to head out. The soldiers’ sharp eye helps inform DEVCOM’s fielding of weapons to soldiers, Padalino said. 

The Army’s firing ranges in upstate New York are far less permissive than the real-life combat scenarios seen at Iraq’s Al Assad airbase, though. 

One challenge in running the exercise is how to safely run counter-drone live fires, said Major David Endter, the event’s lead planner. 

“It's not just how far out does your weapon go, it's how far up does your weapon go,” Endter said. 

Counter-drone weapons fire into the air, which poses a risk in three dimensions rather than the flat plane of a shooting range. The use of more exotic weapons—like electronic warfare systems or lasers—also risks affecting systems on and off the range, involving yet more officials managing everything from the electro-magnetic spectrum to airspace management.  

Endter says the hope is that the experience of setting up live fire tests will eventually help the 10th Mountain be able to easily practice counter-drone warfare. 

“We want to know: how can we get as much home station training as possible here?” he said.

The division wants to “eventually get to a point where any unit in 10th Mountain says, hey, I want to go out and practice counter-[drone],” he said. “They can go occupy a range, they can call up range of control, and we can get drones in the air.” 

Those lessons might then help other units set up their own counter-drone ranges, he added. “We want to share those lessons with other divisions across the army,” he said. 10th Mountain commander Maj, Gen. Scott Naumann “wants to show that this is something we want to encompass and create at every home station inside the U.S. to train every soldier.” 

The event did not include first-person-view (FPVs) drones, said Endter, referring to a form of loitering munition commonly used in Ukraine that can fly at speeds over 100 miles per hour. 

Padalino said small quadcopters like FPVs do not typically pose much of a threat to 10th Mountain troops. U.S. bases in the region are typically fortified enough to withstand the weak munitions such drones can carry. 

“The amount of work our teams have done to continuously harden these bases has been phenomenal,” he said.  

But as in Ukraine, counter-drone defense frequently falls to soldiers without air-defense backgrounds. 

“I did not have a single air defender under my battalion that was in charge of defending Al Assad air base,” Padalino said. “They were artillerymen, medics, infantry-men.” 

With as little as sixty seconds to take out enemy drones, Padalino said, junior officers and noncommissioned officers often had to take the call to take out the drones — or to hold fire after identifying an object as friendly. 

And after every attack, the troops strove to glean lessons for the next.

“We reviewed every single engagement, not to talk about what we did right, but what we could have done better.”