The low-flying challenge: Drone defence and the RAAF

Of all the many shifts in warfighting we’ve seen come out of the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the impact of relatively cheap and not-at-all-cheerful commercial drones has got to be one of the most game-changing.

Larger, properly militarised systems have certainly been impactful in the air and on the sea, but its COTS systems – commercially available off the shelf – that provide tremendous bang for buck, often quite literally, and that are widely available in a number of form factors.

It’s these systems that are the focus of an essay written by Corporal Ryan Hodson for the Air Force Writing Competition.

The essay – The Weaponisation of Toys and Implications for the Air Force – grapples with the very real implications of COTS drones and the impact they will have on everything, from defending RAAF and other ADF facilities to drone detection and counter-operation, and even offensive cyber and spectrum-based warfare.

“Many within our Defence organisation would assume COTS drones and similar are easy to counter,” CPL Hodson said.

“However, there are a number of issues presented by modern COTS drones that have soft implications across the entirety of our ability to exercise air power.”

The need for speed

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CPL Hodson broke down COTS drone capability into a number of key challenge areas, the first one being speed – and these little toys are fast. Your basic hobbyist drone, the kind of thing an enthusiast might normally take away on holiday from some happy snaps, can reach speeds of up to 80km/h; a racing drone up to more than 120km/h.

As CPL Hodson pointed out, even without a payload, something moving that fast poses a purely ballistic threat at an individual level, while that speed allows drones to approach any target at pace.

Strap an RPG warhead to that same drone and, in many ways, it becomes almost more versatile than systems like Javelin anti-tank missiles.

“When delivered via a COTS drone, there is no IR plume, because no rocket was ‘fired’, and the drone operator can choose to attack from the top, launching a salvo at a target without necessarily exposing themselves,” CPL Hodson said.

And that’s not even considering the vastly improved cost-per-shot compared to dedicated tank-killing platforms.

Detection is another challenge, as while dedicated military drones often feature distinctive form factors, COTS models come in a variety of sizes, making automated detection difficult. Their size and manoeuvrability, particularly in built-up environments, provide another wrinkle when it comes to detecting and thus countering incoming drones. To pick apart this puzzle, traditional radar-based detection platforms need to be coupled with optical, thermal, or even acoustic sensors, which, while they may make detection more accurate, add more data into the decision-making loop to determine the response to a possible drone attack.

This last capability feeds into another area of difficulty, and that’s the threat of drones as a vector for cyber operations. Not only can COTS drones be a vector for cyber attack themselves, but the highly networked platforms needed to detect them become themselves part of a now enlarged attack surface for offensive cyber operations.

“For the drone detectors to be truly effective or modernised, they need to be interconnected to a central node and share real-time data,” CPL Hodson said.

“This means that the cyber attack surface grows as these stand-alone systems, which are notoriously bad for talking to each other to begin with, are integrated.”

Drone-buster-buster

Counter-drone operations are also not as simple as they appear. Drones are commonly taken out in “fratricidal” incidents on battlefields across Ukraine, as one side’s jamming efforts against the enemy also manage to disable friendly drone units as well as friendly radar and other systems.

Drone jamming becomes even more challenging when the contested environment is an urban one. As CPL Hodson pointed out, “Turning on a jammer at the Russell offices in Canberra may sound fine, until the azimuth of the jammer is pointed towards incoming civil air traffic whose primary source of air navigation, GPS, is now denied.”

Hard-kill options, such as a close-in weapon system (CIWS) might seem a solution, but again, not in an urban, civilian environment, where airbases exist side by side with private housing.

Trust becomes another important metric to consider, especially when considering a drone’s speed of approach and difficulties in making a positive ID on the nature of a drone threat. For CPL Hodson, education is one of the key elements to build trust so that pilots can understand the drone threat and how detection systems will respond to that threat and then counter it in a timely manner – which comes back to speed.

“Speed, therefore, is not just a threat in its own right in terms of how fast that thing is coming my direction, but also an artefact of the pace of change we are experiencing – the speed of innovation and evolution,” CPL Hodson said.

What makes the COTS aspect of drone warfare particularly challenging is the many areas it overlaps with; nuisance drone flights already occur regularly in restricted airspaces, so how does one identify a hobbyist unwittingly getting their drone too close to a sensitive facility compared to a drone flown in anger? How do we manage an already congested 5G/6G spectrum, and how do we construct a legal framework to manage off-the-shelf drone threats?

CPL Hodson concluded that while the threat isn’t immediate, it is nonetheless an impactful one. We’ve already seen how drones can complement a first strike, particularly in Hamas’ use of them to overwhelm air defences. However, as much as a threat, immediate or not, that drones represent, they do not, as CPL Hodson explained, present a paradigm shift.

“Understanding and educating our aviators as to the scheme of modern threats, recognising their impacts across our capabilities including impacts to cyber, spectrum, and personnel,” CPL Hodson said, “will go a long way towards understanding these threats as we explore further systems to defeat them across the entire continuum of conflict.”

You can read the full Corporal Margaret Clarke Award-winning essay, The Weaponisation of Toys and Implications for the Air Force, here.