A $95.3 billion fiscal 2024 supplemental/foreign aid bill passed by the Senate on Feb. 13 has $5.4 billion to increase production of counter UAS, artillery, air defense, and munitions’ components, but a bill summary does not contain a break-out of funding levels for each area nor system.
A congressional staffer said that, unlike standing appropriations bills, supplementals can suffer from last-minute provision assembly and “a lack of rigor.”
“Some of them work, and some of them are science experiments, and some of them have been there forever and are not functional,” the staffer said of counter UAS.
The House is on recess until Feb. 28 when it is to reconvene and take up its supplemental, which may include counter UAS in addressing aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, as well as border control funding.
The U.S. Army Joint Counter-small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office is examining counter UAS for the military services, and Congress may propose additional research and development authorities to allow DoD to identify commercial counter UAS that are working in the field and to plug significant counter UAS gaps.
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 (Defense Daily, Jan. 29).
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.
Last week, U.S. Air Force Gen. James “Scorch” Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said that, due to cost, the U.S. should not focus on “exquisite systems” for counter UAS, but instead pull a page from Ukraine’s playbook and include low-cost, ad hoc innovations that have proven effective, such as an acoustic sensor network of cell phones (Defense Daily, Feb. 14).
Using the cell phone data, Ukrainian anti-aircraft artillery has proven adept at downing Russian-employed drones, such as the Shahed-136, Hecker said.
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. “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.”