Company insight
Blinding eyes in the sky I
f the war in Ukraine has taught us anything, it is that drones can make or break a campaign. Providing vital intelligence on enemy positions and payloads to destroy enemy armour, UASs (unmanned aerial systems) have proved their worth in the Donbas and beyond. Just a week into the conflict, to give one example, a 15-year-old used his commercial drone to spot enemy vehicles before relaying the information to Ukrainian artillery units. By one estimate, the boy and his father helped destroy nearly two dozen Russian tanks by shortening the time it takes to perceive a threat and act appropriately. Yet amid growing acceptance in the power of drones – the Kremlin alone has spent around $9bn on UAS in the last few years – the systems to repel them are often surprisingly weak. Leaning on outdated personnel-intensive platforms, sometimes just re-purposed anti-aircraft platforms, many traditional CUASs (counter unmanned aerial systems) feel inappropriate in a world where drones can dominate the battlefield. Not that the situation is hopeless. By leveraging the latest processing technology, and keeping up with broader developments in the field, militaries can protect themselves from any airborne threat.
Accelerated kill chains Tristam Constant is in a good position to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of modern UAS. A soldier in the British army for a decade, he now works at Anduril, a defence products company building AI-enabled autonomous systems, focusing on CUAS growth and delivery.
And as Constant stresses, UAS has proved its worth time and again across the war in Eastern Europe. “Low cost UAS are being utilised on both sides of the current conflict to accelerate kill chains,” he explains. “I think the fact that they’ve been so prevalent demonstrates their value on the battlefield.”
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As the anecdote of the tank-busting teenager implies, the main strength of contemporary UASs are their versatility. Costing as little as $1,000, users with some savings and access to a smartphone can use them for a range of intelligence tasks. That is shadowed by more direct lethality. 3D printers have helped arm some drones with canister bombs, while the Biden administration plans to sell Kyiv UASs that can be armed with Hellfire missiles. Yet study what militaries are doing to counter this enemy in the sky, and it is
UASs have dramatically proved their worth during the war in Ukraine – but systems countering them have traditionally struggled to keep up. Defence and Security Systems International talks to Tristam Constant, a specialist in CUAS growth and delivery at Anduril, to learn more about how leaning on new sophisticated technological platforms can keep ground-based assets safe.
Anduril’s family of systems is powered by Lattice OS, an AI-powered, open operating system that brings autonomy to defense's toughest missions.
clear that CUAS is far less dynamic. That begins with manpower. Some contemporary platforms require as many as 20 people to operate effectively. This is bad enough at the best of times but even worse in a war like Ukraine’s, where casualty rates can reach 1,000 per day and where artillery can decimate a huddle of troops in an instant. This is ultimately a question of technical capacity. Lacking so-called mesh networking and edge computing – avoiding the need to send sensor data back to a central hub, speeding up processing and reaction times – many existing CUAS systems require troops to congregate in a single spot. Apart from being more dangerous, this approach is also easier to disrupt. “For a point-to-point network,” Constant explains, “it's very easy to jam that sensor, comms link and control node.”
The Anvil system's integrated launch box, allowing for 24/7 remote launch at a moment's notice.
That is echoed by broader technological problems. Relying on general-purpose radar systems, for instance, risks exposing the device’s signature, leaving the platform vulnerable to enemy attack. Even worse, they struggle to accurately judge the elevation of UASs even as they can pinpoint their distance. Constant summarises the challenge succinctly: “Many suppliers who produce CUAS systems may not have
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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