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Snake oil merchants galore

Modern technology can do some amazing things.

Take, for example, the way that drone technology has changed the theatre of modern warfare and created (as I predicted back in 2003) a huge imbalance between the power of cheap weapons versus that of expensive ones.

Today, a $500 FPV drone, armed with a shaped-charge explosive, can take out a multi-million dollar tank or helicopter. This creates a hugely asymetric war where simply throwing more money at a conflict does not guarantee a win.

Of course the governments of the world are finally wising up to the threat that these low-cost "suicide drone" technologies now pose (it only took 25 years for them to do-so, despite my warnings back at the turn of the century).

So now, the big rush is for Counter UAS (CUAS) anti-drone technologies that can be used to protect civilian/domestic targets from the threat of terror or other attacks on critical infrastructure.

All over the world, governments are now throwing huge sums of money at anyone who *claims* to have a solution.

To take advantage of this situation, companies are popping up out of nowhere and all claiming to have the latest and greatest CUAS technology that they'll sell to those governments for a very sizeable chunk of change.

There are two problems with this situation:

Firstly, much of the perceived need for CUAS products is driven by unfounded hysteria.

We've seen countless examples where the media has reported "unidentified drones in the sky", almost always at night. Politicians and other stupid people claim that these drones pose a threat to national security and a risk to the public. The incidents over New York and New Jersey a few years ago is the perfect example of this. There were even claims that the lights seen in the sky were Russian drones being launched from submarines off the coast.

The reality is that almost without exception, these "drones" were nothing more than manned aviation, often scheduled commercial flights, being mis-identified by idiots who'd simply never before looked up at the sky at night.

Never the less, this created the *need* for CUAS technology to protect airports and infrastructure.

The same thing happened in the UK at Lakenheath where media reports of unidentified drones turned out to be nothing more than police helicopters mis-identifying US F15 fighters flying with their afterburners on. Never the less, this resulted in the UK demanding that suitable CUAS technology be acquired and installed at airports and critical infrastructure sites.

And, of course, the same thing has happened across Europe, where mis-identified manned aircraft flying at night also created a wave of "drone" hysteria and saw governments seeking to spend massive amounts of money on tech that would supposedly detect and protect against these non-existant drones.

The second problem is that the claims of these CUAS manufacturers are often nothing more than ridiculous hype.

There are two problems -- how do you detect a drone and, once you have, how do you stop it?

The first problem is comparatively easy when compared to the second.

Most drones emit radio-frequency signals from their video transmitters and telemetry systems. It's not hard to detect such signals and even triangulate a drone's position based on them. That's fine for regular store-bought drones -- but those generally aren't the problem. The problem (if there was ever going to be one) is the drone operated by a bad actor or enemy state. Chances are that those drones won't be broadcasting anything. The'll be fully autonomous and "silent" from a radio perspective.

To their credit however, some of the better CUAS systems do also use such things as cameras (particularly thermal cameras) and even some forms of radar to help detect potentially threatening drones. Never the less, there is no guarantee that a truly malevolent drone will be detected before it is "on target".

The harder of the two problems however, is that of stopping a potentially threatening drone once it is detected.

Given that these systems are largely automated, what kind of countermeasures can be *safely* deployed to neutralise the threat?

Kinetic responses (missiles, bullets etc) are probably not acceptable. Firing into the sky in an area where there are likely to be houses or valuable assets may cause more harm than good.

Electronic countermeasures are also risky. Much of the standard drone electronics operate on regular ISM (licence-free) bits of the spectrum. ISM stands for Industrial, Scientific and Medical so it can be incredibly risky simply firing a powerful beam of energy on those frequencies in the hope that it will interfere with the control or video links used by a drone. Radio frequencies don't suddenly stop at a specific distance -- they just keep on going and if (for instance) there's a hospital down-range, blasting a huge amount of energy on an ISM band could, at least in theory, knock out some very important piece of life-support gear if the beam was pointed in the wrong direction.

Never the less, you'll have all seen the ridiculous "anti drone guns" that many companies are parading around as an effective anti-drone countermeasure. These things are not only pretty useless but they're also illegal in almost every country due to incredibly strict radio-spectrum controls.

I won't say that things are as bad as they were when the fake NATO bomb detectors were being sold, but we're not far off.

Paranoia, ignorance and greed are all very negative things -- but they do allow some folk to make a lot of money, if they are prepared to deal in snake oil.

Carpe Diem folks!

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