Analysts: U.S. Unprepared to Counter Cheap, Mass-Produced Strike Drones

After decades of air superiority and a near-monopoly on precision strikes, the United States now faces a radically different, more hostile world: the spread of cheap strike drones has made mass precision strikes widely accessible.

This is stated in the report “COUNTERING THE SWARM: Protecting Joint Forces in the Drone Age” by the independent think tank Center for a New American Security.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Army allowed its short-range air defense capabilities to decline, creating a significant vulnerable gap that drones have only exacerbated.

Meanwhile, the threat from pre-programmed, long-range military kamikaze drones and small commercial UAVs will only continue to grow. They are cheap enough for adversaries to stockpile in large numbers, and their size and flight profiles let them exploit the weak points of traditional air-defense systems.

Russia and Iran learned about the threat of drones the hard way after Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web and Israel’s Operation Rising Lion.

In these attacks, small drones caused significant damage to large, defenseless, and expensive weapons systems. The United States must learn from these mistakes and prioritize countering drones, or risk suffering a similar fate.

As the analysis of US defense spending in this report shows, the Department of Defense has invested in countering both existing and new unmanned aerial vehicle systems for nearly a decade. However, these efforts have been hindered by a lack of sufficient scale and operational readiness.

The US considers China its main strategic adversary. And the People’s Liberation Army of China is rapidly improving the capabilities of its drones, developing more autonomous systems, and purchasing them on a large scale.

Without significant reserves of significantly improved countermeasures against drones, the US risks having its distributed warfare strategies overwhelmed by massive Chinese drone attacks, and the US could lose the war for Taiwan.

According to analysts, it is necessary to prioritize anti-drone defense and expand the capabilities of troops beyond air defense units. Defense against drones cannot be based solely on air defense units. Each unit must have the ability to defend itself against small unmanned aerial systems.

The Pentagon also needs to develop and disseminate best tactics, techniques, and procedures, and ensure that all units are trained in self-defense against drones.

A separate problem is that the current testing process creates a false sense of confidence in anti-drone system prototypes. This is because they are often evaluated using unrealistic copies of enemy drones and electronic warfare systems.