The U.S. military is sending new technologies to Iraq in response to an increase in the use of commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles by Islamic State (ISIS) militants.
Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for Operation inherent Resolve, confirmed on Wednesday reports that ISIS has modified commercial-off-the-shelf drone designs to deliver airborne improvised explosive devices.
“It’s a threat that’s not new to the area,” Dorrian told reporters via video conference from Baghdad. “This happens fairly commonly with regard to surveillance. My predecessor acknowledged that the enemy has used UAS devices to surveil and even deliver ordnance.”
The Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Agency (JIDA) has been working with coalition forces to disarm booby traps left by retreating ISIS fighters. JIDA now is taking on a counter-UAS role with new technologies like the Battelle DroneDefender counter-UAS device, a non-kinetic solution capable of defending up to 400 meters of airspace against UAS such as quadcopters and hexacopters, without compromising safety or risking collateral damage.
“To supplement the capabilities already in theater … advanced systems have been sent that are capable of detecting, identifying, tracking and defeating UAS threats,” he said. “We don’t just let the enemy develop a capability that threatens our forces and those forces of our allies and partners and leave that threat unaddressed. So, we’ve moved some additional capabilities into position and we will go after those capabilities whenever and wherever we see them.”
ISIS almost exclusively uses inexpensive off-the-shelf quadcopters that can be bought at various commercial retailers. Dorrian said “there’s nothing high-tech about them.”
“They can just buy those as anybody else would,” Dorrian said. “Some of those are available on Amazon. So I don’t know exactly how they get them, but they’re routinely available.”
ISIS drones have been spotted hovering over coalition and Iraqi military bases and in at least one instances were designed to perform a “Trojan-horse style attack where a drone exploded after being shot down and carried to an Iraqi base, Dorrian said.
“We know that there was an improvised device on a drone,” he said. “When that was brought back to the camp, it exploded. So, the reason or the way or the manner in which that happened, still digging into that.”
Dorrian said ISIS drone use is not a significant threat to the coalition and the momentum being built to assault and retake Mosul. Both U.S. and Iraqi forces have shot down suspected ISIS unmanned aircraft.
“It’s not going to stop anything that needs to happen from happening,” he said.
“Most of these are just surveillance and not, you know, dropping of ordnance or — or this latest sort of Trojan horse-style attack,” he said. “ So it is something that we see. We have engaged some of them with some of the capabilities that we have. Both we and our partners and have shot some of them down.”