WASHINGTON — The US military needs to quickly develop affordable methods to counter small unmanned drones used by Islamic State terrorists to move explosives into an area, the Air Force's top civilian urged Monday.
As military operations in Iraq and Syria continue, US forces are encountering an "emerging threat" of unmanned aerial systems, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said at a Center for a New American Security event. Over the past several weeks, there have been multiple instances of Islamic State operators in Iraq and Syria buying cheap, off-the-shelf UAS and equipping them with explosives — basically using them as flying bombs, with sometimes fatal results.
"A week or two ago that there was a situation and four were killed — they were not US citizens — from one of these small unmanned systems," she said.
"How do we put our heads together on that topic quickly and figure out how to defeat that type of approach?" James continued. "It's not necessarily the development of a new thing to defeat it. It could be taking what we've gotten already and packaging that in a different way to go after that threat, but we need to do that more rapidly."
In a separate incident about a week ago, the Air Force was notified about a potential Islamic State UAS threat, she said. The service was able to bring the it down "fairly quickly" through "electronic measures," she said, declining to comment further on the tactics or weapon systems used to defeat the drone.
James stressed that potential solutions do not have to be kinetic. "You don't necessarily have to shoot," she said. "There's a variety of ways to attack the problem and what we need to do is put our best thinking together and focus on it going forward into the future."
Concerns about the Islamic State’s use of unmanned aircraft is not limited to one particular service. The Pentagon in July requested an additional $20 million for the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization (JIDO) to develop and buy counter-UAS technologies.
The Army is at work on a strategy for defeating small UAS, with the document awaiting signature from senior service officials before publication, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the service’s capability integration center director, said earlier this month. The service’s new Rapid Capabilities Office will also explore the problem and help develop new ways to overwhelm enemy drones.
And during the CNAS event, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus pointed to another emerging technology that could one day be used to shoot down small UAS: directed-energy weapons like the Laser Weapons System, which has been installed aboard the USS Ponce since 2014.
Valerie Insinna is Defense News' air warfare reporter. She previously worked the Navy/congressional beats for Defense Daily, which followed almost three years as a staff writer for National Defense Magazine. Prior to that, she worked as an editorial assistant for the Tokyo Shimbun’s Washington bureau.
