Michael Marrow
Hovering hundreds of yards away, the small quadcopter drone was nearly invisible to the naked eye, but its size didn’t make it any less of a potential threat to operations on the ground here.
Spotted by sensors, defending personnel dispatched their own drone — this one armed with a net. A few minutes later, in the Colorado air, the friendly drone snagged the interloper, popped a parachute and both floated harmlessly to the ground.
The incident, this time, was not a real threat but a demonstration, part of a series put on by US Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to explore ways to counter small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), an increasingly ubiquitous presence not only on the battlefields of Ukraine and the Middle East but lurking around American bases back home. The Pentagon has documented hundreds of suspected drone incursions at military facilities in the last few years, even if many are thought to be the work of hobbyists.
Nets were just one tactic on display during this two-week exercise in October called Falcon Peak, which was limited to non- and low-kinetic mitigation techniques to stop sUAS. On this Army base here, defense industry firms brought kit tailored to defeat the drones in scenarios where military officials emphasize their options are limited by regulations that protect civilian travel, largely preventing them from using many commonly available but more aggressive kinetic and non-kinetic tools.
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