US Army rushes to boost defenses as Russia ups strike-drone autonomy

Russia is giving its armed drones more autonomy as Ukraine’s defenses tighten, a dynamic that has the U.S. Army working harder to bulk up its own anti-drone and -missile systems, service and industry officials said.

Defense One caught up with Sgt. Maj. Kellen Rowley, the top enlisted leader of the 10th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, at the AUSA conference in Washington, D.C. We asked him whether Russia is increasingly relying on autonomy software for drone attacks in order to thwart defensive measures that target the connection between the weapons and their operators.

“They are,” Rowley said. “They are becoming more adaptive. We saw them struggle quite a bit with dynamic targeting. As time has gone on, they’ve adapted.” 

He declined to comment further. 

An official from Epirus, which makes advanced counter-drone defenses, said greater autonomy was a growing trend in Russian drone attacks on Ukraine. 

“There is clear evidence that full drone autonomy and swarming technology will become more pervasive in this new era of asymmetric warfare. One significant advancement in drone tech we’ve been closely tracking is the use of fiber-optic-guided and AI-enabled UAS that are immune to jamming and other EW countermeasures. Without a connection to jam or spoof, AI-enabled drones have seen success in Ukraine,” the official told Defense One. 

Epirus makes the Leonidas high-powered microwave system, which is designed to overloads an incoming drone’s circuits with energy. That’s just one example of the various solutions that the Army is rushing to put in place to deal with drone threats that are growing more diverse and difficult to stop. Russia, Iran, China and North Korea are deepening their collaboration in multiple theaters, resulting in ever-more-capable drones emerging from adversaries that weren’t considered terribly high-tech. 

Maj. Gen. David F. Stewart, a leader of the Army’s efforts on fires and anti-drone systems, told the crowd at AUSA that better drones and new tactics are enabling even low-tech adversaries to punch up their attacks, such as a Hezbollah drone strike that killed four Israeli soldiers on Sunday. “We're seeing a lot of changes in tactics to take these procedures from the adversary. Their flight profiles now are becoming more challenging for radar systems to detect,” said Stewart, the director of the Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and director of fires at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff. “I think the better capability to detect the Group 1, 2, and 3 would be very helpful.” 

Brig. Gen. Patrick Costello, who leads the 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command, said that some new adversary drone weapons were emulating U.S. technology advancements, a trend further enabled by collaboration with Russia and China. 

“North Korea recently unveiled a reconnaissance and multi-role UAV that employs a reverse engineered copy of a Hellfire missile similar to an RQ-4 and MQ-9. And so as we watch the relationships that are building,” Costello said.

He said the Army had just finished an engineering test with the Northrop Grumman XM1211 High Explosive Proximity round, an air-defense munition that is designed to explode near drones that may be attempting counter maneuvers. 

“We want to extend it further,” he said, with work on an anti-drone proximity round that can be fired from an Mk19 40mm belt-fed automatic grenade launcher. 

But the need for better drone defenses in more places is adding pressure on the Army to more quickly adapt as it meets the needs of partners. An example is last October’s decision  to send two Iron Dome systems back to Israel.

U.S. Army Multi-Domain Task Force teams in the Indo-Pacific region are working to develop an entirely new capability to replace those Iron Domes: the Indirect Fire Protection Capability – High-Power Microwave, or IFPC-HPM, also from Epirus. 

“We have soldiers out there testing the system. We will be employing it in the next couple of years. As the formation grows, we'll transition from structure of two Iron Dome batteries to a structure of three IFPC batteries, giving us nine platoons worth the capability,” he said. “Absolutely [we are] watching what's going on in CENTCOM, absolutely watching what's going on in UConn, taking every one of those lessons that we could, that we could apply to our theater.”

But counter-drone defenses are more complicated than roboticized attack drones for reasons beyond autonomy and technology, such as the increasing bureaucratic burdens of trying to work with more partners. 

Said Rowley of the 10th AMDC, “I think probably our single biggest challenge is operating inside of NATO. There are 32 member nations in NATO, and our adversaries are exporting gaps to NATO policy. Group one, group one, UAS are able to operate below the threshold, and it's a challenging bit for us, under peacetime conditions and authorities for soldiers to recognize when they should or can engage.. 

All of that points to a need for more collaboration across the services, the U.S.  government and with researchers, industry, and partners, said Stewart, the counter-drone office chief.

“I'm pushing for a whole-of-nation approach, not just a whole government. When we're talking about other interagency partners, it really is going to have to be academia. You're going to have to have the government involved, and then on down the line with the industry as well.”