Drone wars: How swarms could spoof the enemy
By: Jen Judson, May 16, 2017TAMPA, Fla. -- A web of swarming unmanned aircraft systems that can spoof enemy drones could be a solution to the shot doctrine problem when exercising counter-UAS capabilities, the vice president of science & technology at Cintel, the company developing the technology, said at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference on Tuesday.
Back in March, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command commander Gen. David Perkins told an audience at the Association of the U.S. Army’s winter meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, that a partner nation used a $3 million-plus Patriot missile to shoot down a $200 drone. “The problem is, on the kinetic exchange ratio, the Patriot won,” he said. “On the economic exchange ratio, I’m not sure that’s a good economic exchange ratio.”
Cintel’s Mock Abdelaal said at SOFIC that his company’s solution would provide a non-kinetic “soft-kill” solution to countering cheap enemy drones. If an enemy drone moved into the web of the swarm, it would be spoofed causing it to freeze or return to its home base.
UAS systems and jamming solutions are vast and capable, he said. Spoofing capabilities are a bit harder to achieve, but Mexican drug cartels, for instance, have successfully spoofed Predator UAS running border security.
Developing a swarming network of UAS equipped to spoof or jam enemy drones comes with its challenges; among them is how do you prevent the spoofing or jamming of one’s own UAS and how can swarming UAS continue to function in a GPS-denied environment.
Cintel is working on a solution that uses video imagery collected on the UAS that coordinates with mapping data already loaded onto the platform. The video imagery collected in real-time will match up with the data to help it navigate when GPS is not an option, Abdelaal told Defense News.
Abdelaal said the company envisions the technology working on quadcopter-type UAS, but isn’t ruling out the possibility of it working on fast-moving, fixed-wing UAS platforms. But the quad-copter’s flight characteristics work better in a swarm pattern, he said.
Additionally, current spoofing payloads would require larger unmanned systems, as smaller UAS can’t accommodate the size of the technology yet, Abdelaal said.
The company is working in a collaborative engagement with a couple of customers within the Defense Department including the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center (AMRDEC).
The Army is looking for an electronic-warfare system that can be integrated onto a Gray Eagle unmanned aircraft system, according to a request for information released earlier this year.
It doesn't take a missile to shoot down a drone, so the Army is rethinking battle across domains
By: Meghann Myers, March 13, 2017
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — After nearly two decades fighting in developing nations like Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army is pivoting toward the future, focusing on winning fights against enemies with comparable technology.
To do that, the Army and Marine Corps got together to envision what that battle might look like and came up with "Multi-Domain Battle: Combined Arms for the 21st Century," a white paper that dropped Feb. 24.
"Interdependence is our primary vulnerability," said Gen. David Perkins, commander of Army Training and Doctrine Command, at the Association of the United States Army's winter meeting in Huntsville, Alabama, on Monday.
The U.S. military operates in the land, sea, air, space, cyber and electromagnetic domains, he said, but with a piecemeal approach that an enemy could jam if it figures out how to isolate one or several of them.
To push back, American forces need to break down the barriers between those domains so each segment is working toward the same solution and so problems can be solved across domains, Perkins said.
A potential adversary has three main focuses, he said. First is to fracture the air-land combination that worked so well in battlefields like those of Operation Desert Storm.
"They saw what we did. They said: 'You know what, this coalition is really good when they bring it together,' so we want to sort of fracture that synchronization," Perkins said.
Gen. Perkins AUSA ILW 2017
Gen. David Perkins, head of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, discusses multi-domain battle at the Association of the United States Army winter meeting March. 13 in Huntsville, Ala.
Photo Credit: Luc Dunn/AUSA
They also want to put up a strong anti-access/area denial fight to keep U.S. forces out of their area of operations.
"Don’t let them get a footprint into the area of operations, because once they get a foot in there, they’ll build of the proverbial mountain of iron," Perkins said. "Even if they want to leave themselves, they won’t be able to get out."
The last is to keep the ground forces at bay, which is where the Army and Marine Corps figure in the most.
"Don’t let them maneuver on you," Perkins said. "If I can fix the U.S. military and its coalition partners, and I can keep them, sort of, without being able to bring their domains together — and if I can even keep them at arms length — I have a change of defeating them and deterring them."
Multi-domain battle should make that a lot more difficult.
"One of the ways this is different than even when we started looking at air-land battle is [when] we would have a problem, we would then break it down into war-fighting functions and domains and then start solving those problems in those proverbial cylinders of excellence," Perkins said.
Then they would join back up to synchronize them, but because they had been developed in a silo it would require workarounds to reintegrate the domains.
“Too many times our solutions were optimized for a person who owned one part of the fight, but were not optimized for the commander who owned all of it,” Perkins said.
Now that the white paper is out, he added, the Army is socializing the idea and looking for feedback on how to redesign the battlefield framework to support it.
Crossing domains
Part of multi-domain battle also involves breaking down barriers between domains.
“We don’t just have a land-based artillery shell that starts off and engages another land-based target,” Perkins said. “There’s nothing to say you can’t have a land-based Army fires capability that could have anti-ship [capability] or an anti-unmanned aerial capability.”
The Army also needs to reorder how it looks at capabilities like air defense. Perkins offered the example of a U.S. ally that was having issues with an enemy drone in its airspace.
“The gut instinct was, well, that’s an air defense problem,” Perkins said.
So much like one would with an enemy fighter jet, the ally shot the quadcopter down with a Patriot missile, a $3 million-plus piece of ordnance. “The problem is, on the kinetic exchange ratio, the Patriot won,” he said. “On the economic exchange ratio, I’m not sure that’s a good economic exchange ratio.”
That dynamic is much more sustainable for an adversary.
“If I’m the enemy, I’m thinking I’m just going to get on Amazon and buy all the $100 quadcopters I can and expend all the Patriot missiles out there,” he said.
Instead, there could be an electromagnetic or cyber solution to jam a drone and drop it from the sky without firing a shot.
The next step, he said, is perhaps figuring out an Army fires unit that could respond across domains — with electromagnetic fire power or out to sea depending on the situation.
Small drones have big advantages, but they require strategy
By: Adam Stone, March 3, 2017
The military thinks more may be better when it comes to unmanned aircraft flying intelligence missions. Instead of going in with a big, slow MQ-1 Predator or MQ-9 Reaper, maybe it would make sense to utilize swarms of small, cheap, nimble drones.
This scenario looks especially promising in urban settings, where tall buildings, tight spaces and narrow sightlines can complicate drone operations. But new issues arise with UAV swarms: how to control them effectively; how to fly dozens of machines at once in a smart, coordinated way?
DARPA is looking to address the question through its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program, or OFFSET. The goal is to use virtual reality gaming and other techniques to develop 100 or more operationally effective swarm-piloting tactics.
Today’s navigational techniques are clunky.
“We still are trying to drive these systems in the way we steer a car. We are watching sensor feeds, being called to attention when there is a problem,” said Timothy Chung, DARPA program manager.
“Because of the sheer scale and complexity of these swarm systems, those conventional means will just not work. So we need to explore how to encode a tactical language, a tactical lexicon. We need new paradigms for how we interact with these systems,” he said.
The question is more than merely hypothetical, as military leaders have made it clear that unmanned swarms will be a tool for future commanders.
DARPA’s Gremlins program is looking to develop a system that would allow aircraft to launch swarms of inexpensive, reusable UAVs. The Pentagon has demonstrated such a capability, though its potential uses remain uncertain.
At sea, the Office of Naval Research has shown off a capability for unmanned surface vessel swarms, and Air Force leaders have talked about purchasing 1,500 to 2,000 small UAS for ISR mission sets.
To meet all these ambitions, the military will first have to figure out how to operate the UAVs effectively. That’s where OFFSET comes in.
The human interface
Program leaders are wrangling with a number of questions as they look for a means to effectively maneuver future swarms, starting with issues surrounding the interface between the swarm and the human operator.
“Pilots” might control the swarm through gestural interface, through touch screen, joystick or voice command. Most likely the solution will involve some combination of inputs.
“Maybe a heat map or dots on the screen is appropriate in some cases, whereas if I want to split the swarm into sub-swarms, maybe that is more ‘logical’ than ‘spatial,’ so it would be left hand, right hand,” Chung said. “There might be different ways to present information based on the types of tactics that are required.”
Given the extreme complexity of the swarm ecosystem, planners may need to develop more novel forms of interface. “The richness of the interactions we wish to have with these swarms may merit more immersive technologies,” he said. “That might be virtual reality, augmented reality, all the way to virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, where you can communicate with them and they can provide you with tactical information.”
Virtual reality will have a role to play on OFFSET, outside such questions of interface. As the team seeks out solutions, it will be developing a VR gaming environment in which users develop tactics for swarm manipulation in a simulated environment.
Technical constraints limit how swarms can be used in the real world, “but we still want to explore the possible combinations,” Chung said. “It would be difficult for us to explore every permutation of a swarm system in the physical world, just because of the time and cost. So we see an opportunity to employ a game-based environment, a virtual environment, where we can insert and explore technologies in these swarm tactics.”
This approach could give military planners insight into how best to use future swarms. For example, game drones could be rigged out with hypothetical sensors, giving them the ability to see through multiple sets of walls. If the results look promising, military planners might push development of such sensors for actual deployment.
“We want to look at the things we can look at physically, the things we can presently realize. But we also look at what we can do in this virtual setting, and then toggle between those to determine where we can best invest our development resources,” Chung said.
The biggest challenge here is the need for simultaneous efforts in the development ecosystem. For swarms to fly, engineers need to work out the aviation aspect; software needs to evolve; the human interface has to be refined, and lots of heavy-duty computational and decision-making tools will have to be built. All this has to happen more or less at the same time.
“I have a glass full of water on a table that I am currently building. So I can’t just build one leg of the table, or the glass will tip. We need to build all the legs concurrently, in a holistic, systems-oriented approach,” Chung said.
Small drone market to reach $10 billion by 2020
By: Michael Peck, March 15, 2016
The global small drone market will reach $10 billion by 2020, according to a forecast by research firm MarketsandMarkets. This reflects a compound annual growth rate of 11.6 percent from 2015.
"This growth can be attributed to the rising need for efficient border surveillance and general ISR functions, along with for commercial applications such as agriculture, logistics operations, monitoring and surveying globally," according to the report.
North America is the largest market, but the highest growth will be seen in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.
"The Asia-Pacific market is driven mainly by the increasing investments by China and India for the development of multifunctional small drones in defense as well as commercial applications," the report said.
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