Angry Planet - How to Down a Drone

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Drones are everywhere. Military drones buzz war zones dropping missiles; surveillance drones hover above neighborhoods, looking for anything out of place; even now, commercial drones hide in holiday wrapping, waiting for excited enthusiasts to fly them in a park.As the market for drones has grown, so too has the market for tools to take them down. There’s jamming rifles, spoofing software, and hundreds of other solutions for downing a drone. But what to buy the budding enthusiast?A new report from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College could be of some help. The report is a list of 537 counter-drone systems. What works, what doesn’t, and what is just hype.Arthur Holland Michel is the author of the report, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone, and also the author of the book Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It WIll Watch Us All.You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, welcome to War College. I am your host, Matthew Galt. Drones are everywhere. They are dropping hellfire missiles in the Middle East, conducting surveillance operations all over the world, and even flying around suburban neighborhoods in this post-holiday season. As the market for drones has grown, so too has the market.

for tools to take them down. There's jamming rifles, spoofing software, and hundreds of other solutions. But what is best for the budding anti-drone enthusiast? There's a new report from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, and it could be of some help. It lists 537 counterdron systems, what works, what doesn't, and what is just hype. Arthur Holland-Michelle is the author of the author of the Co-Dron, and the author of the book Eyes in the Sky, Secret Rise of Gorgon Stair and how it will watch us all. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. All right. So what is this report exactly? What exactly are you covering and what's its history and its genesis?

So a couple of years ago, not coincidentally, right around the time that ISIS started strapping bombs to hobby drones and flying them around in Syria and Iraq, sometimes to quite considerable effect, people all over the world started wondering how to shoot these things out of the sky, because even though drones can do all sorts of really great things, they can also be used to nefarious and malicious ends. And as it turns out, back then, there wasn't a whole lot on the market that could do exactly that, anything, things that were sort of designed to counter drones. And so suddenly there was this kind of mad rush to acquire this technology and a huge number of companies emerged claiming that they had products that could take down drones through a variety

of means. I noticed this trend in sort of 2016, 2017, and it struck me as being problematic because you had this very untested technology. this significant demand and all sorts of unknowns. And so I set out to write a report sort of covering the technology, how it works, how you can shoot down drones, what the general systems that are out there are. And also, including in that database of products on the market, that report came out in February of 2018. and there were about 230 products that I could find that were specifically marketed as being capable of taking down drones or detecting drones. There was a lot of interest in that report, and so the report that you have in your hands now that we're talking about today is the second edition of that report.

It came out about 18 months after the original first edition. And what it shows is that there has been even greater growth in the counter drone sector. But the issues, which I'm sure we'll discuss in the moment, have become all the more complex. And there are so many organizations out there that are interested in detecting, and in some cases, yes, bringing drones out of the sky, that, that, there's been a huge demand for this research. Now, when we're talking about drones, what are people looking to counter? Are we talking about the small off-the-shelf drones, or are we going up to, you know, Predator, Reaper?

Yeah. So it's a good question because actually, in the case of what one refers to as counter-dron or C-UAS, counter unmanned aerial system. That really specifically refers to small drones. And why do I say that? Because large drones, like predators and reapers, the kinds of drones that are used by militaries in war zones for airstrikes and things of that nature,

I mean, essentially the size of aircraft. And militaries around the globe have spent 100 years figuring out how to shoot down aircraft. they're actually very good at it. And so the same techniques that you can use for shooting down, say, a fighter jet with surface-to-air missiles, for example, can be applied to military drones. That is why, for example, Iran was able to shoot down a $200 million US Global Hawk surveillance drone last summer using essentially Soviet-era anti-aircraft. technology. So that's the large drones. What we're talking about is the small drones, and that is a totally unfamiliar technical challenge. The air defense systems that exist all over the world,

even in heavily defended places like Washington, D.C., are simply not designed to detect small, low-flying, slow-flying, unmanned aircraft, and they're also not designed to shoot them down. So what we actually have here is a sort of unprecedented technical challenge, which is made all the more pressing by the fact that unlike a $200 million surveillance drone owned by the U.S. military, these small drones that are so hard to detect and shoot down are very easily accessible. Anyone can buy one for a couple of hundred dollars on Amazon, and that's really the worry that proliferating so quickly. You've already touched on it a little bit, but I'm wondering if you can dig just a little bit more.

What are the qualities of these small drones that have created a market that has exploded where you have 537 different possible solutions? So there are a couple of elements there. One is that you cannot address it, as I mentioned, with sort of traditional anti-aircraft measures. There was an incident, I think, in 2015 that really brought this into relief when an individual who had had a bit too much to drink was flying a drone near the White House, and he actually crashed it into the White House lawns. Now, an aircraft, you know, a large aircraft would get nowhere near the White House. I mean, there was that gyrocopter, that postal worker flew, I think, near the Capitol. But, you know, it's sort of an exception that's also kind of hard to detect.

But this drone got literally inside the White House grounds and was undetected by any of the defensive systems that the White House had. There is also the fact that there have been a ton of incidents like that. And that has in part driven this demand, where you see headlines all the time of, you know, drone flying over sensitive military sites, for example. There was a couple of years ago a host of mysterious drone flights over a U.S. Navy submarine base that is a highly protected facility in Washington State. there was obviously the case of Gatwick Airport in December 2018 when a single drone it appears was able to disrupt and for the most part completely shut down air traffic at Gatwick Airport for more than 30 hours. Every time there is an incident like that, security agencies around the world, not to mention the security. agency that was affected by that very incident goes online and types in how to counter drones. And then they find a whole list of companies that are advertising products to do exactly that.

They're getting pitched by these companies all the time. And in many cases, they are acquiring these products, often for a very hefty sum. And so those are sort of the dynamics at play in the market. because it is a threat that is here and is present, a lot of these organizations aren't willing to wait. You know, I mean, you're a busy international airport and a Gatwick-style incident could happen to you tomorrow. So you're just going to take the chance and not install a counterdrawn system, or are you actually going to take matters into your own hands and do so? Those are the dynamics, as I said, at play in the market space right now.

So how much of this stuff actually works? Well, it's a kind of hard question to answer in broad strokes. One generalization that is easy to stand by, because everybody in the industry and in the security sector will say it, is that nothing works perfectly, and no single system is going to be effective against all drone types in all environments under all conditions. Every single system has drawbacks as well as benefits compared to other systems.

That is simply the fact of the matter at the moment. We have all sorts of technical challenges that have been resolved, so to speak. You know, you dial up a number on your phone and you know that you know that. you'll be reliably connected to the next person. It's not a sort of game of chance. That is a technical challenge that has in a way been resolved. But when it comes to detecting and bringing down drones, it remains an unresolved technical challenge.

If you'd like, I can tell you about some of the most popular techniques for detecting and bringing down drones. Please, what are people buying? What seems to be working? So there are two distinct but interconnected pieces to countering drones. You're obviously going to want to shoot a drone down, but there's no way of shooting a drone down if you don't know that it's there in the first place. And so it all starts with the detection technologies. And there are a variety of ways to detect drones over, in some cases, quite broad areas.

One of the most popular is to use a radar. There are radars that are specifically calibrated to detect low, small objects like drones. There are also radio frequency detectors. These are essentially systems that detect anything that is emitting the radio frequency signals that drones tend to emit when they are connected by a remote control with their operators. There are cameras that can detect drones at fairly long ranges. Those are sort of the basic main elements. Then there are some slightly more niche options. For example, acoustic sensors.

These are essentially microphones that listen to the specific noises that drones emit. that, you know, a kind of, they're very distinctive. If you've heard a drone, it's a sound unlike kind of anything else. And so you can essentially create a microphone system that will alert you when it hears that sound. And it matches that to a library of known drone sounds. So you've detected your drone. In many cases, also these products will actually combine different sensors to play off each other's strengths. So maybe a radar is detecting small objects,

is good at detecting small objects from a great distance away, but it may be detecting a seagull rather than a drone. Well, then you use a long telescopic camera to actually confirm that it is indeed a drone. But let's say you've detected the drone and now you want to do something about it. Well, the most common technique that's available is essentially to jam the communications, links that the drone has. So most drones have essentially two sort of signals that they are emitting and receiving. One is a radio link with the person controlling it.

And the other is a link with a satellite, a navigation link, just like the GPS link on your phone. If you sever that link using what's called a signal jammer, you can essentially force the drone to go home or to land. These drones, most drones that sort of you can buy, say on Amazon will not operate. They will refuse to fly if they don't have those links. As you mentioned in the introduction, there are also things called spoofing systems. This is essentially like a hack where you take control of the drone by fooling it into thinking that you are its actual controller by its, by its remote control link or fooling it into thinking that it's actually somewhere else by giving it false GPS signals.

Then you can get a little bit more extreme with your shoot-down techniques. There are a lot of nets on the market, essentially these nets that shoot out of cannons and ensnare the drone, bringing it down to the ground. there is a lot of interest in using high-powered lasers to burn holes in the body of the drone, thus also bringing it out of the sky. There are a lot of projectiles, that is to say, ammunition, you know, shotgun shells, small bore grenades that can also be used to shoot down drones and some of them that are actually specifically designed for that purpose. And then there are some sort of more colorful options. You can, and this may seem like a joke, but it's not. You can use what's called a collision drone or a sacrificial collision drone.

And that is essentially a drone of your own that flies and smashes into the incoming drone, thus bringing it out of the sky. Or, and this is kind of like the ultimate, but it's also kind of sci-fi. and very expensive and only the Air Force seems to have it and they're still only just testing it, you can use a high-powered microwave. That is essentially a high-intensity beam of energy that fries all the electronic circuits on the drone, thus bringing it out of the sky. That's the overview of the techniques that are on the market.

All right. Thank you for listening to War College. We are on with Arthur Holland, Michelle, talking about counter-drone technology. We will be back in just a minute. Thank you, War College listeners. You are on with Matthew Galt. We are talking to Arthur Hall and Michelle about counter drone technology. Just before the break, you were kind of giving me the overview of the different popular systems.

So, you know, if people Google it or the picture that's usually displayed when someone's reading a new story about counter drone technologies, it's kind of been a cliche in my mind. it's always somebody with this huge bizarre rifle that looks like something from a side inspection film. Are these the lasers and the microwave system that you're talking about? So those rifle systems are actually the jammers. So a signal jama, which as I mentioned earlier, is used to disrupt the radio link or the GPS link with the drone, is essentially it's just an antenna. but it's a very high powered antenna and it needs a lot of energy and so it needs to have a big battery attached to it.

Well, as it happens, you can package that into something that looks and feels and operates kind of like a rifle. The thinking being a that security services personnel are already trained in operating firearms and so this will feel very natural to them. You're not sort of reinventing the wheel. And also, you know, you're kind of marketing in the visual language that they understand and appreciate her and even perhaps attracted to. So, you know, who doesn't like a big rifle-looking thing that can buzz drones straight out of the sky?

Oftentimes also these are what's called directional jammers, which means that they shoot a beam in one specific direction. that is to say you have to aim at the drone and that can minimize some of the collateral effects you are in theory not going to you know mess up the radio links of some other aircraft say operating nearby and you see that image a lot well one because it looks really crazy and cool

and kind of sci-fi-esque and two because it actually is the most sort of popular technique, both in terms of the products that are on the market, but also in terms of who, you know, what has been purchased so far. All right. And is there a sense at all of what works and what doesn't? Well, as I mentioned earlier, it's kind of a question of matching the technique to the environment. That both goes to the detection side,

actually being able to spot and identify the drone and on the shooting it down side as well. Keep in mind also that it's not just about what works, but it's also about what is appropriate because you may have a technology that is really, really good at shooting down drones. say, for example, a really, really powerful laser. But you're probably not going to want to use that over an NFL game, for example,

because now you have a burning molten mess of plastic, metal, and a lithium-ion battery that may be on fire, burning at several thousand degrees Fahrenheit, falling to the ground at great speed. So, you know, in that situation, you may want something that's more like a spoofing technology so that you can, in theory, take control over the drone and land it safely.

Well, what is the problem with that? It's perhaps less of a sure bet because maybe the drone has been hardened against spoofing attacks. The same kind of calculus also goes, for these signal jamming systems. Okay, great, you're able to, you know, block the drone from receiving GPS signals.

Suddenly the drone has no idea where it is. But think about all the things in modern society that rely on GPS, car navigation, people with their smartphones, getting directions on Google Maps, airplanes, and so much else. And so if you're just wide, disrupting GPS links in, say, an airport, you're actually creating a hazardous situation.

And that is why specifically jammers are actually illegal to use in most countries around the world. So it's not that any one single system, you know, is categorically across the board better. than any other. Every single system is going to involve trade-offs. So, you know, in a way, the ideal system is a drone that has a cannon that has a net in it, and so it can get close to the intruding drone and, you know, shoot the drone with the net, and then grab the net through a tether and carry the drone. to safety, thus avoiding the drone falling on people's heads. Well, yeah, I mean, that's great,

but it's also incredibly difficult to do that, right? I mean, you're going to need a drone with artificial intelligence that's able to target the drone. You know, the net's going to have to catch on properly without, you know, causing the intruding drone or both drones to fall to the ground. You know, there are so many variables there that maybe you're not going to sort of take a bet on that. Security organizations at the moment, and as I sort of say in summary, are having to deal with those tradeoffs at

the very moment, and it is a very difficult equation to crack. All right, so your report just lists out what exists. You obviously with 537, you know, there's obviously no time for you to test effectiveness of each and every individual solution, correct?

Yes, and actually that there's no testing to speak of. A lot of these systems are very expensive. They're hard to get a hold of. So yes, this is purely based on what is advertised as being available. Is there any sense that any of these are just grifts? Oh, definitely. There are definitely products on the market that if not being quite pure snake oil, they definitely have a dose of snake oil to them. You know, it's hard to point to specific, you know, products on the market and say, oh, you know, that particular product with X name is, you know, is definitely snake oil because, again, without doing the testing, it's a little hard to tell. You know, you can look at certain systems and have a healthy dose of skepticism about them.

I mean, you know, if you have some company that's claiming that it has swarms of artificially intelligent drones that are able to patrol the skies, and I'm talking kind of hypothetically here, and shoot down incoming drones, again, using artificial intelligence and that it's a fail-safe system, you know, things that seem to over-promise. like that, you know, they are probably not entirely going to hold up when you actually do test them. You know, I think there is perhaps a sense in the market that security agencies, because they are in such a rush to acquire these technologies, are not always going to have the time to do the due diligence and test a bunch of products on the market. they may place orders for systems that, you know, seem to work in the product demo. And they're like, okay, yeah, we'll give it a shot because it's urgent and we're desperate. There was a case, for example, that I think illustrates this well, where a company by the name of Anderil Industries, which is this surveillance and military technology company started by Palmer Lockhe, who was formerly the founder of Ocky, Well, this company, Anderil, they kind of, as a bit of an experiment, it seems, developed these collision drones that could autonomously fly up into the sky and knock the intruding drone out of the sky. And according to one news report, one of the employees took a smartphone video of those initial tests and sent, literally texted that smart.

that smartphone video to a contact at the Pentagon, and the Pentagon placed an order of these systems that were literally at that point still just like a lab experiment, not for deployment, but for testing. And that, to me, is a great illustration of how security agencies and militaries are in a way willing to take a bet on anything that has some chance of working. That is, on one hand how you sort of push forward new innovations, but there are going to be companies that take advantage of that. And then there are products that are essentially just, you know, this is a classic case, is signal jammers that were originally designed for jamming some other type of system with a signal, say enemy radios, and has just been essentially put into a rifle form

factor and now it's advertised as a drone jammer. Well, it's not really a new product. It hasn't been specifically designed from the ground up for countering drones. And so it might be a little rough around the edges in that regard. You've got a bunch of these old systems sitting in a warehouse that you can't move, repackage it, sell it as something else. Yeah. I also found a ton of drone jammers on Alibaba, which I found fascinating. There are a bunch of Chinese. companies that, I guess, have been in the jamming business for quite a long time. You know, jamming is not a new technology. The militaries and security services use jammers for a long time.

They're very popular, for example, for jamming, you know, explosives, remotely determined explosives. And there are a bunch of these companies. And, you know, for $10,000 on Alibaba, you can buy a, you know, a, a, a, a, a, drone jammer that looks like it was probably just some other type of jammer that has been repackaged. All right, let's change tracks here just a little bit at the end. So it seems like you have built your career around drones.

Why is this an area of concern for you? It's an interesting story how I got started in this space. Around 2010, 2011, I was actually a student. doing my undergrad at college, this college called Bard College in upstate New York, and I just got super interested in drones, sort of on a personal level. It didn't have anything to do with what I was studying. I was a history major. But I just felt like this technology was so formidable and mysterious,

and it raised all kinds of really tricky and complex questions. And these were questions that people weren't really talking about at the time. certainly not in a sort of serious academic interdisciplinary way. And people were just starting to gain some consciousness of, for example, drone strikes in undeclared war zones like Pakistan and Somalia and Yemen. And then there was also all this talk about how drones were going to be used domestically, you know, in civilian airspace. And no one really knew how that was going to work and how you were going to stop these things.

from either crashing into each other or crashing into other aircraft or from invading absolutely everybody's privacy. I thought, wow, this is it going to be some questions that are going to take some pondering? And so as a bit of an experiment, me and another student at the time we launched what then became the Center for the Study of the Drone. And by the time we graduated from Bard, you know, having set up a bit of a blog to, you know, report. on some of our research and ponderings and doing a speaker series, there was enough interest in our work and in the topic that we were like, hey, let's run with it. And so we did, and that was in May of 2013. So it's now, what is that, six and a half years that we've been doing this.

And the topic has only become more complex and more vast. And I'm looking at all sorts of things that I couldn't have even dreamed of when I got into this, for example, counter drone technology or the fact that there aren't just aerial drones, there are drones that operate like unmanned boats or unmanned submarines or unmanned ground vehicles. And they also raise all sorts of interesting questions. So in a way, there's still quite a lot of mileage to be got out of all this. And then it raises all questions about artificial intelligence, sort of looking into the future. It seems like it's only going to get more complex. And where does Gorgon Stare fit into all of this?

So when I started researching drones, I mean, you know, there are so many, shall we say, frightening technologies that you come across. Drones that are called the Predator or the Reaper, Hellfire missiles, all the talk about drone swams. But there was one particular technology, Gorgon Stair, that for some reason just stuck with me more than any other. What is Gorgon Stair? Gorgon Stair is essentially a gigantic camera that has not megapixels but gigapixels. So it is orders of magnitude bigger than, say, a professional camera that's used for, I don't know, say, sports photography or the 12 megapixel camera on your phone. As a result of having all these pixels, a camera like Gorgon Stare is able to watch whole city-sized areas. at once tracking thousands of people and vehicles simultaneously.

It was used in a very secretive set of operations that were almost entirely shrouded in secrecy. And I thought there has to be some backstory there that's fascinating. And as it turns out, there was, and I ended up writing a book about the technology, which is the book that you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, Eyes in the Sky. It's a technology called wide area motion imagery in the technical sense. And the final chapter, if you will, figuratively speaking of the story is that it's going to be used domestically. In fact, the city of Baltimore just announced that it is going to do a six-month aerial surveillance program with this very technology this summer to try and track down violent crime. in the city, raising all sorts of really difficult, ethical and legal questions that remain

unanswered. It sounds to me a lot like we are in store for a little bit of what London has, but from the sky instead of from the streets. Yeah, absolutely. And in a way, this technology is perhaps more formidable because it creates one single unified view of the entire city or the whole area that's surveilled, which in many cases the size of the whole city. So the system in Baltimore is going to be able to watch 90% of the city of Baltimore. And once you find a vehicle, say, that is of interest, you can just track it

wherever it goes, as long as the aircraft is flying. This was, there's a fascinating backstory to the technology, where it was actually inspired by a movie. I'm sure many of listeners have seen a movie called Enemy of the State from 1998 with Will Smith and Gene Hackman. This is sort of, it's a pretty good movie. It's a thriller about this rogue government agency, you know, chasing Will Smith because he has something that they want. And they have this crazy aerial surveillance satellite that at the time was completely full. fictional, but a government engineer was watching that movie

in the late 90s and was so inspired, he was like, hey, we should actually build something like that. And then went back and did exactly that. And then the CIA sort of adopted the program, and it ultimately was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan for tracking down people who are planting improvised explosive devices and more broadly

hunting down these networks of insurgents. And it continues to be in use today. It seems to be very, very

effective and successful. And so one can only imagine what it could achieve over an American

city. Yeah, it's increasing it repeatedly terrifies me how often it seems people

smart people were reading cyberpunk books or or or watching you know cyberpunkish thrillers like like enemy of the state and thinking like oh you know what that's a good idea like we should we should do that and now here we are yeah yeah they they watch movies too and you know they will take a good idea from wherever they can they can get it and um you know in some cases There have been instances of the Pentagon even enlisting sort of the creative types from Hollywood and, you know, from the sci-fi realm to directly give them ideas. The Marine Corps for a couple of years now has been directly hiring sci-fi writers to come up with just wild, futuristic visions of what, you know, marine warfighting will look like in 2050, and the idea is that they will sort of build some of that into R&D and planning and doctrine. So it's very much a phenomenon that should come as a surprise to nobody, which sort of

casts any sci-fi movie that you watch that has potentially dangerous technologies in it in a new light, because you're like, huh, I wonder who else might be watching this movie. Yeah, I think one of these that really strikes me is Larry Niven, who advised the Reagan administration on nuclear policy. It is also a very famous sci-fi writer, and I believe now is doing work for Department of Homeland Security in a similar vein. So, yeah, we live in a strange world. But that is, I think that will cover it. That's all the time we have for at the moment. Arthur Hall and Michelle,

thank you so much for coming on to War College and talking to us about the study and also the book Eyes in the Sky, The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stair, and how it will watch us all. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Oh, it's been my pleasure. That's it for this week, War College listeners.

Thank you for tuning in. War College is myself, Matthew Galt and Kevin O'Dell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. I know that a lot has been going on in the past few weeks, especially in the Middle East, and that there's a lot for us to talk about, but we want to do it right. We have a really good guest lined up that's going to help us do that

and talk about an aspect of that conflict that I think is getting ignored. But we're saving that for next week. I do also want to tell you that I've sat down and recorded an episode about Metal Gear Solid 2. Coming soon. I don't know.