Small kamikaze drones have been a worry for U.S. commanders–most recently in a deadly attack on the U.S. Tower 22 base in northeast Jordan near Syria on Jan. 28.
While the U.S. military services have pursued advanced technology efforts to detect and destroy such “one-way” drones, the U.S. may be able to leverage the relative simplicity and low-cost of what Ukraine has done to detect and destroy Russian-employed kamikaze drones, such as the Iranian Shahed-136.
“We learn when someone’s back is up against the wall, they come up with a lot of creative solutions, and, if they don’t have a lot of money–and Ukraine doesn’t–they can figure it out.” U.S. Air Force Gen. James “Scorch” Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, told an audience at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual warfare symposium in Aurora, Colo., on Feb. 13. “We give them some exquisite weapons–some things that are pretty expensive, but that’s not gonna do it all, and I think we’re finding that out as well in the United States Air Force, that we just can’t concentrate on the exquisite because we don’t have enough money to buy all the exquisite stuff that we need so we have to also bring some low-end stuff.”
As an example, Hecker said that the Ukrainians “were trying to figure out how to track all these one-way UAVs that Russia is putting in the theater.”
Such kamikaze drones “come in at 100 feet [altitude], and you can’t see them with a regular radar because you don’t have line-of-sight over the horizon because of the curvature of the Earth,” Hecker said. “Two guys from Ukraine–doctors–came and briefed me at Ramstein [Air Base, Germany]. They did this in their garage with their own money and made this happen. What did they do? They grabbed 8,000 cell phones, and they put them on a six foot pole, and they put them all around Ukraine and put a microphone next to it so they could hear the one-way UAVs coming overhead. It cost $500.”
“They were able to get headings and velocity of these things [Russian kamikaze drones], and then they put that into a computer system that went out to 200 mobile training units that had AAA [anti-aircraft artillery], and they’d train a guy for six hours to sit in the AAA and look at an iPad that would show where the UAVs were coming in,” he said. “They had 84 [Russian kamikaze drones] that came in the other day. They tracked all 84. They shot down 80 with AAA. That’s on the right side of the cost curve, as opposed to shooting them down with Patriots and SM-2 missiles.”
Hecker contrasted the Ukrainian approach with that of the U.S. in countering an Oct. 18 Houthi attack using cruise missiles and kamikaze drones against Israel. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, USS Carney (DDG-64) used Standard Missile-2s (SM-2s) to shoot down over the Red Sea the three cruise missiles and the drones launched from Houthi-controlled territory in Yemen, DoD said.
RTX [RTX] builds the Patriot and the Standard Missile family.
On Oct. 18, 21 Houthi-employed kamikaze drones “came over at $7,000 apiece, and we shot them down with $700,000 SM-2 missiles,” Hecker said on Feb. 13. “That is not the right side of the cost curve. We need to be thinking this way as well. Can we get some low-cost things to take down what we know is gonna be one-way UAVs coming our way? AAA, directed energy, things with a deep magazine, microwave–there are a bunch of things out there, but we need to think about that to protect ourselves against that threat that’s gonna come in swarms.”
While some countries in the 31-nation NATO alliance find a buy of the Lockheed Martin [LMT] F-35 beyond their budget, “they can all afford a $10,000 UAV,” Hecker said.
“If we start doing the same thing, we’ll get 15 other partners involved,” he said. “They can launch and put a bunch of these–if we have to–across into Russia, and now we can empty their [Russian] magazines where they’re taking SA-21s, 22s, and 23s [surface-to-air missiles] going after $10,000 one-way UAVs that our partners produced, and it cost us no money because they [U.S. NATO allies] wanted to be part of the war and deterrence.”