Irregular Warfare Podcast - Drones are Here to Stay: The Proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Systems Across the Spectrum of War

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

Episode 108 examines the use of unmanned aerial systems across the spectrum of conflict. This episode is part of IWI’s special project, Project Air and Space Power. Our guests explore the use of the full range of UAS technology by both state and nonstate actors. They unpack the democratization of air power through the proliferation of small unmanned systems and address the race to find cheaper countermeasures for the technology. Finally, they address the advent of automation and the impact of private sector involvement.

States have certain constraints that disable them from maximizing the latent potential of unmanned platforms. Violent non-state actors don't. So they can use the full latent potential of these platforms in warfare. They don't care about flying over the hill and dropping ammunition indiscriminately. So I think that again, in the normative side of things, that's another way that Vilemon's actors can bridge the parity gap.

One example is I met a commander recently who is encouraging the soldiers of the unit to have drone races in their free time. And they're doing like unit hosting events where they're competing against each other for who's the best drone racer, things of that nature. And so to me, that's a creative way of commanding that formation to innovate. Welcome to episode 108 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Nathan Kaczynski, and I'll be joined by my co-host, Laura Jones.

In today's episode, we are joined by Dr. Kerry Chavez and retired Army Colonel Bill Edwards. This episode is produced in collaboration with IWI's Special Project on Air Power. Our guests explore the use of the full range of UAS technology by both state and non-state actors. They unpack the democratization of air power through the proliferation of small unmanned systems and address the race to find cheaper countermeasures. Finally, they address the advent of automation and the impact of private sector involvement.

Dr. Carrie Chavez is an instructor in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University. She is a non-resident fellow with both the Modern War Institute and the Institute for Global Engagement's Independent America Project. She is the project's director at the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Laboratory and her article, The Empirical Determinants of Violent Non-State Actor Drone Adoption, provides the foundation for this episode. Retired Colonel Bill Edwards is the Executive Vice President of Security Services for PMY Group. Before this role, Bill was CEO and owner of Phoenix 6 Consulting LLC.

While active duty, he served as the Director of Intelligence for Special Operations Command North and held command in Iraq where he oversaw the planning and execution of all base infrastructure. He also teaches leadership, strategic communications, and negotiations through the Air War College. You are listening to a special series of the Irregular Warfare podcast supported by the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Dr. Carrie Chavez and Colonel Bill Edwards. Carrie, Bill, thanks so much for being with us today.

Thank you. Very happy to be here. It's great to be on this show and I've been looking forward to it. Thanks. So can you please introduce our audience to the spectrum of UAS technology that currently exists? Our audience, I'm sure, is aware of an MQ-9 or a commercially purchased quadcopter, but can you go over the spectrum from the off-the-shelf or 3D printed low-end drones to the highest end? What all is out there?

So, the best way to describe drones is through the categories. There are five categories of drones, one through five. Everyone on the DOD or military side is well aware of category four and five drones, which are the really larger platforms. We're talking about Grey Eagle, Predator, all the bigger ones that have been in the airspace for decades now. But really where people get confused is in categories one, two, and three. And those categories are what we call the commercial drones or the commercial small

UAS platforms that are available with the click of a mouse and purchased in the commercial space. And by the way, all drones are categorized by size. And so anything 55 pounds and less are categories one and two. And then when you get above 55 pounds, you get into three, four and five. Categories one and two are really where I like to focus as a professional as it pertains to this ecosystem that is starting to evolve or rapidly evolving in not only in conflict zones, but in society. Kerry, let's start with you on the next one.

Who are using these capabilities and are there any surprising overlaps like major military powers like Russia using cheap off the shelf drones, as well as larger, more sophisticated airframes? Yes, there have been some new surprising overlaps. So initially, of course, the more advanced states were the drone states. They were the ones with the financial, of course, the more advanced states were the drone states.

They were the ones with the financial, the technical, and the infrastructural capacity to develop drone programs or to just receive technology transfers from other nations. It takes a certain capacity, bandwidth, or threshold to do that. So at the beginning of the drone era, I guess the first drone era, it was mostly advanced wealthy nations capable of doing this with the commercialization of the technologies, especially as those normalized around 2012, that lowered the capacity thresholds for a broader range of actors. So for the most part, it was violent non-state actors that started assimilating these technologies to field accrued

air force. But there have also been some cases where violent non-state actors have state sponsorship and have been able to attain military grade platforms. So that's one of those not surprising overlaps, I'm going to say. The military grade ones, and I know we kind of just created a typology about size, but I think there's also a part of this is about qualitative capacity as well, because military grade technologies are more regulated. So the violent non-state actors that have been able to attain that have primarily been able to do it through state sponsorship.

Then with the Russia-Ukraine war, we saw the reverse process happen, where first Ukraine started absorbing commercial platforms. This is all the way back in 2014 in the Donbass. They were doing poor man's drone warfare in order to vie against the state-sponsored separatists. And then they started doing it at scale in the total war with the invasion. So that was a key demonstration point where other states started to see this as a major force multiplier and a flexible platform in the air littoral that they weren't conceptualizing before, even though they saw violent non-state actors doing it in a lot of theaters where they were operating, even though it problematized

states, strong state militaries. So we are now seeing a number of state militaries adopt small UAS, commercialized variants and then hybrid commercial with military upgrades for things like data link security. Israel's doing it in Gaza, of course Russia and Ukraine are doing it furiously right now. The US Army recently announced that they are going to start absorbing this into their units and I expect a number of other Western nations will follow suit. I agree. I think what Kerry really did a great job of articulating how that's taking shape. And I'll just point out that what we're seeing in the commercial market from a drone perspective,

and some people like to say small UAS platform, I just say drone for simplicity, that market didn't take shape until 2010. And the first company to come to market was a French company called Parrot. And Parrot brought the drone to the commercial space. So if you think about that on a timeline, it's very interesting to look at because as a ground commander in Iraq in 2009 through 2011, I didn't have this problem. I didn't have this problem as a commander to worry about, but as time made its way to present time, we saw, as Kerry articulated, the non-state actors starting to develop capability. And capability then equates to multiple environments. But really around 2014 is when we saw ISIS start to use these platforms from an ISR perspective and then of course from a weapons delivery perspective.

But that was also the timeframe when the Ukraine-Russian war really started in some respects. And also people tend to forget about Azerbaijan and Armenia, and the fight that took place in those countries where drones, specifically Israeli drones, were really tested along with Turkish drones. And then that's what we saw in Ukraine and Russia in the very beginnings of this conflict. I want to jump a little bit further into the details as to what capabilities these products and then these airframes offer on non-state actor. You know, are they primarily using them for ISR? Are they looking to get into the long-range precision strike game? Are they primary

you know anti-personnel platforms? And what are the limitations that these airframes possess? And then a follow-on to that question would be, is this kind of, do we see like a regularization of non-state warfare where they're trying to gain capability to do more multi-domain operations, more what we would consider regular battlefield operations? So the capabilities these offer, the most frequent, the most densely used ones I would say is ISR. A lot of groups use it for that and solely that. I think the sexier use of it is the weaponization. That's the one that makes all of the headlines, of course. But it's not all groups that use it that way. I don't think that most have attained the capability of

long-range precision strike. Especially the ones that are breaking into air power through commercial platforms, they have pretty limited ranges, envelopes, just because that's the commercial capacity that's out there, unless they do have fixed wings platforms. And of course, the anti-personnel strike feature is a component of that weaponization. But talking about what this provides them relative to the manned systems and those limitations, for the violent non-state actors, first of all, I wanna emphasize these groups, they're outmanned most of the time,

they're outgunned and they're under-resourced relative to, well, first other groups that they're contending with, but also state militaries. And small drones offer them a solution to each of those problems in one flexible platform. A single Amazon drone can provide them a force multiplier, can help them at a strategic level, film this very polished cinematography from the air for their recruitment and propaganda, can reduce risks to their few and precious personnel. And it's very hard for them to recruit sometimes because they are performing illicit activities

and it's very particularized in-group trust that they have to build out those networks. So it helps with that. In terms of being outgunned, it helps them have a platform for weaponization, a platform for target designation and correction for their other weaponry. So it helps that to go farther. And then for information and under-resourced aspects, it provides them with the ISR, both pre-planning, pre-attack, and also command and control in real time. So I think it's a pretty acute force multiplier for these groups that have no air capabilities

at all. The marginal jump they get from it and the risk aversion or mitigation that it provides is profound. When you talk about conflict zones and you talk about the ability, what has taken shape in this laboratory of Ukraine, you have this technique called first-person view or FPV that has been perfected as a precision stripe capability. And the only limitations, Laura, based on what you had asked, what are some of the limitations are really the limitations of batteries inside of these platforms, how long can they fly, are there EW or electronic warfare implications as those platforms are flying. And we're that you know obviously it's in the open press with the russians are very good electronic warfare so there's been a lot of creative ways for the ukrainians to really sort of. Be agile in their small drone platform use but all of these ttp these techniques procedures, are available to the common viewer on YouTube.

And so that's why it's pretty serious and why it's pretty important because everything is explained in how-to videos in an open source environment, which for me is concerning when it comes to the technology. So going back, circling back to answer the original question, the platforms are being used in all groups. They're being used original question, the platforms are being used in all groups. They're being used for ISR, they're being used for precision strike, they're being used in anti-personnel ways, they're being used in anti-armor capabilities, they're being used to take out reconnaissance. I saw a video yesterday of a FPV drone taking out a Russian long-range camera

called a Maron, And so they're going after different targets all the time. I've also seen interviews with soldiers coming off of the trench line talking about that the environment in the tactical operations has completely changed warfare, that they have to be aware of drones 100% of the time. And so what I like to say is that we can no longer afford not to look up because in past conflicts, we really always had air superiority, air dominance. Now there's this level and Kerry was describing it really was describing sort of a parody or bringing parody in the air domain to an actor that may not have a very strong air force or an air capability. Going back to the non-state actors here, I wanted to mention about the limitations.

Of course, in conflict, a lot of times the norms and the laws of armed conflict go out the window as exigencies arrive. But for the most part, violent non-state actors don't adhere to the same normative constraints that states do. So the way that states fly military-grade drones, there's a lot of rules and regulations and protocols in place so that they are used in a normatively appropriate way. States have certain constraints that disable them from maximizing the latent

potential of unmanned platforms. Violent non-state actors don't. So they can use the full latent potential of these platforms in warfare. They don't care about flying over the hill and dropping ammunition indiscriminately. So I think that again, in the normative side of things, that's another way that violent non-state actors can bridge the parity gap, not just materially or operationally. Yeah. I think we saw that on October 7th with the Hamas offensive into Israel. But what we have seen since is that it has been very difficult for Hamas to actually use the small drone platform in Gaza because combat operations on the Israeli offensive

side have taken that ability of them to use the drone platform in an offensive way. They've taken that away from Hamas. It's hard to pop up out of a tunnel or out of some enclosed environment to try to launch your drone when the force you're fighting can identify that quickly and strike it quickly. And so there has been this, we see it on initial, I think initial strike. If we're going to talk about non-state actors, we see that they might have had the advantage on October 7th, but they've definitely lost that advantage now as combat operations continue to move forward. What's interesting is I've gotten some really good details on how the IDF, the Israeli infantry,

is using the category one or group one drones as far as a reconnaissance tool into buildings and tunnels. What's interesting is their tool of choice is actually the DJI Avada platform, which is a Chinese-made drone that has enclosed rotors. It allows it to, if it hits a wall or bounces off a wall, it can stabilize itself. So the Israelis have those like in their rucksacks, a soldier might have five or six or seven, I don't know the number, but they use them as an expendable, it's an expendable tool for them. They fly it into a building, if the battery dies or the drone is compromised, they just

go into the building after establishing the video and then they kick that drone aside and launch the next one. And that's what the US military, in my opinion, needs to get to, which is this is an expendable tool, this is something we're going to have to, which is this is an expendable tool. This is something we're going to have to use. We shouldn't have to worry about accounting for it at the end of the day and being able to get the functionality out of it that we need. That's what we're seeing in this urban fight in Gaza.

Kerry, something you brought up that I thought was really interesting about how the barriers of entry have been pretty dramatically lowered for air power, right? But what kind of resource burden does making that decision to invest in this drone technology have for a non-state actor? You know, because one drone isn't going to do it for you and they're quite vulnerable and you know, have proven to be somewhat expendable. So how much investment do they have to actually make in this technology to make it viable and actionable? And is that putting a resource burden on their capabilities outside of the air domain?

That's a good question. I think it depends on the size of the group. It depends on their goals, their agenda, and it depends on the combatants against which they fight. Because we've seen anywhere from lone wolf attacks all the way up to Islamic State with 30,000 plus armed combatants. So the scalability of commercial UAS is another facet of attraction for these groups. And I think in some cases for a small ragtag group of rebels, one or two drones is sufficient for their agendas.

And of course, they probably would want to attain more, but at the end of the day, they're going to invest in the most reliable and impacting platforms available. I do think at the beginning of the commercial drone era, so Bill mentioned 2010 as the first commercial drone company really hitting the market, but 2012 was more around the time when several started to cascade into modern society. Around then, it was much more

of a cost-benefit calculus for these groups. They were trying to understand the relative value of drones compared to the more tried and true methods of combat. The more time has gone on, the more these platforms have been demonstrated in different contexts to be so flexible and malleable for modern warfare. I think the more groups are taking them up. I don't think there's a patent answer of what is that critical mass threshold that they need,

but you can invest in more expensive, higher capability ones and have a smaller cache of them, or you can invest in a whole fleet of $100 Amazon drones depending on your aims. But there's so much diversity in violent non-state actors that I think it really depends on their agenda and how they operate. depending on your aims. But there's so much diversity in violent non-state actors that I think it really depends on their agenda and how they operate. I think the scalability question is great because we have actually numbers and figures

of what it looks like in Ukraine. And I'll just throw some out there. This is all open source. The Russians are building 300,000 group one and 2 drones a month, and they're training 5,200 FPV operators. So that tells you some scale there. The Ukrainians have been promised a million drones this year alone from NATO. The Ukrainians have reported they're losing 10,000 drones a month in combat operations. So then that sort of gives you some idea of the supply chain. The last one I'll throw out is it's been reported there are 6,000 different platforms being flown in the Ukraine-Russian conflict. So every company in the world that has the capability to put some of this technology into that fight is trying to do so for many reasons. One, it's a great R&D environment. And so they can find out if their technology actually works.

But that doesn't even account for 3D printing of drones. And we don't even know what that number is, but it is actually taking shape. I think looking at the Russia-Ukraine war, those are great metrics to cite for two relatively strong states in a total modern interstate war. But I would also embellish that with that is not necessarily the baseline for a lot

of other groups. Because again, that's a total war, right? Those are states that have the military industrial bandwidth to field tens of thousands of drones a month. But again, you can have these small groups, they can advance their agendas, and they can get a lot of marginal utility out of a handful of simple drones as well. They don't necessarily need to have that bandwidth. And the diversity, the breadth, and variation of threats that come from commercial UAS all the way from

tens of thousands of drones in a total war down to your domestic threats, your random small cell or lone wolf types of attacks. I think that is straining security apparatuses and straining resources because I'm'm gonna quote Scowcroft, a hundred pinprick problems from this particular platform that does have benevolent and benign uses such that we can't regulate it. And we don't really want to regulate it because it does have such positive influence on society

when it's used in listed formats. I love Bill's assessment of conflicts as laboratories and Russia and Ukraine is on full display for the world. Anyone on the globe interested in these capabilities, they're taking lessons learned left and right. But Kerry, I want to pick up on where you were just speaking and say, can you talk more about your research with non-state actors? Are there characteristics that drive these groups to seek out or be more compatible with fielding these UAS? I'm also going to tack onto that.

We started to talk about downsides or costs, but I'd love to know if there's an escalation or a visibility created by non-state actors using these capabilities. Does it put them on a level of global warfare that they don't necessarily want? Yes. So in terms of the characteristics that drive a group to seek them out, I had a study that I did using novel data. It was collected from 1995 to the end of 2019. So at this point, it's a little bit dated, but we can of course, speculate from anecdotes since

then. But it was examining what those internal determinants are that drive groups to adopt UAS. And the conventional wisdom was that this is mostly constrained to a few jihadist groups that are sponsored by Iran in the Middle East, and most of them held territory. And the results really debunked that, especially as this has taken off in the dark networks of violent non-state actors. The only determinant in that cluster of conventional wisdom that held up in quantitative tests was being Iran-sponsored. And for anyone who follows this topic, that's

absolutely a strong driver. Iran provides drones to Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis, several special groups. I mean, the list goes on. So that was not a surprising confirmation of conventional wisdom. But beyond that, the strongest driver by far outstripping even Iran's sponsorship is these groups being networked with other violent non-state actors that are using drones. So there is some kind of tacit or material delivery. Either between allies, these groups form operations rooms or they do joint training together or

they just learn that kind of tacit knowledge from one another and then they start to deploy them as well or by watching knowledge from one another and then they start to deploy them as well. Or by watching enemies field them to great effect in combat, often against the group that ends up taking them up later. Kind of like on a state scale, Russia watching Ukraine do it and then emulating them. So being networked, the violent non-state actors live in small world clusters. They usually have, we call them constructivist bubbles. And so once you have this advent drop into one of those clusters, it then diffuses throughout that cluster rather quickly. So right now I'm doing a social network analysis of when the first group in a cluster adopts it.

You see in pretty short order, it pervades the rest of that group. It happened most efficiently in the Syria civil war. At the very beginning, some external sponsors provided commercial drones and Islamic State was using commercial drones. That's of course a multi-sided conflict. So Islamic State was one of the spoilers in that. And you just saw this bloom in commercial drone use very shortly after that among a lot of the rebels and the non-state actors in that theater. So I think that is probably the strongest

predictor. And in so far, as we have seen a number of demonstration points, and we are in this open era of innovation, this globalized arena where all of this stuff is online. What that means is that this will only exponentially increase. We've seen an increasing urbanization in warfare in general as the world population urbanizes. So do you think the proliferation of UAS air power will drive an increasing urbanization in warfare as it's easier to evade a drone moving building to building or in a under city subterranean tunnel. So do you think we also see an increase in subterranean tactics in combat? And then broadly, how do different terrains and battle spaces lend themselves to small UAS and UAS in general? And I'll throw to Bill first.

Yeah, I think actually it's a science question, right? Because the technology itself requires in some aspects, some sort of, someone's telling the platform to do something via a signal or you can actually do it autonomously now. So as the technology matures, and I just wrote an article for Forbes that just came out actually last week about,

I called it tough or hostile environments when it comes to small UAS platforms. But we're seeing that the technology is evolving and maturing quickly enough where maneuvering into those types of environments, it's now actually capable of doing that in some limited ways. Again, if you want to fly a drone into a tunnel that's 100 feet deep, it's complicated to do that, probably impossible, some would say,

because there's too many factors that would limit that platform from actually completing its mission. But actually doing the initial ISR, the initial inspection, or the reconnaissance or surveillance of buildings and urban environments and tunnels or subterranean environments, I think what we've seen in Gaza that there is some capability there to do that. And as the technology gets better, it will only get better.

One of the statements or one of the points I was making earlier was, it's really hard, at least from what I've read and what I've seen and from interviews, for the non-state actor, Hamas, to actually use drones in an offensive capability against Israel, because Israel, in this fight, owns the environment. They own the spectrums, right? They own everything about being on the offensive. So again, it's almost like they're taking away that ability to deploy the same platforms they had on October 7th that, you know, they may still have, but they're not capable of using.

I think it's a really tough problem, but I think technology will eventually catch up and give us the ability to use these platforms in those really, really hostile, hard, let's call them hard environments like urban combat operations. I agree. And I actually wonder if the causal arrow does not go in the other direction as well or instead. I'm not sure.

I think it's an open question for debate. But in Gaza, in the very built up environments, drones have been small. Micro-UAS have been the solution to subterranean and urban combat there. And they are innovating in a lot of ways. Like you were talking about the challenge of sending something 100 feet or yards or whatever in, they're actually using drones to create communication relays throughout that very canalized environment. So drones sending them in first, especially with some of the capabilities that these micro drones have to detect people, arms, explosives, some of them even have grappling arms that can remove them.

They can set off some of those booby traps that have been in place. So insofar as drones are enabling soldiers to do subterranean and urban warfare more effectively and without as many casualties and more efficiently, because those settings, closing that loop is a lot harder because it is so built up. I think that that might actually cause more subterranean and urban warfare because now it can be done well. And it will give the ones that have these drone capabilities an advantage in those environments.

So I'm not sure which one is gonna cause the other, but I think there are arguments for both, good logic for both. So Bill, pivoting a little bit back to something you said earlier about an inexpensive drone versus an expensive tank, I was wondering if you could speak further about how small UASs or even larger systems create an imbalance between relatively

cheap attack platforms versus an expensive countermeasure and how this changes the game of imposing costs on an opponent. I'm going to go ahead and throw in the follow on to that as well. Do you think this is going to drive a renaissance in cheap countermeasure evolution or what kind of innovation is needed to counter the small UAS innovations that we're seeing? The biggest advantage I would say the Russians had early on was its electronic warfare capability, jamming signals and not allowing the platforms to make it to its target.

But there are hundreds and hundreds of videos out there where you can see the FPV drone, that first-person view drone, actually fighting its way through the EW spectrum and still hitting its target. We're also seeing some creative ways of defeating EW as well. We're seeing where the Russians are actually flying drones on fiber cables. In one estimate, we've seen fiber long enough to extend almost six kilometers. That's a lot of fiber, right? That's a lot of what we're going to call it a fishing line. But the bottom line is, when you talk about conflicts, and even if you talk about bridging the gap to why this is important for security and society, it's an action-reaction environment.

They're flying fairly large munitions on Group 2 drones, and they're hitting really really high-value targets and destroying them. I've even seen instances where and this is scary to me because a combat veteran or as an army veteran who's deployed where the EFP IED is now being used possibly on small drones as a weapon as well. That type of munition is extremely dangerous. It is an armor-defeating capability. A quick example is recently Ukraine was able to strike deeper into Russia with an autonomous platform that was really a Cessna airplane that was loaded with some munition and then flown autonomously via AI-driven data around the ability for EW to stop that type of aircraft from making its mission or air

defense operations. The aircraft hits its target. Maybe it's an oil refinery or some sort of strategic target. But now we're seeing these creative ways with larger platforms, which that would not be a category one, two, or three drone platform. That would be something else. And I don't even know how we would categorize it, but it's this creative or imaginative, innovative way for autonomy to take place.

And we're not even in this show today discussing uncrewed ground vehicles. We're not discussing uncrewed surface vehicles, which are really doing some great work in, I think it's the Black Sea against the Russian fleet and other ships. But what I've seen recently too is the uncrewed ground vehicles are now IEDs in the trench lines. The domains here are aerial, terrestrial, and aquatic. They're not simply aerial anymore. And as Bill was talking, one of the questions circulating in my head is, where are you talking about? Because you're talking about Russia-Ukraine, where there's an active conflict. But this

also, this is a ubiquitous question, especially coming from the violent non-state actor world, because yes, the Houthis are attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea and you have Hamas and Hezbollah and the other groups constantly incurring in Israeli airspace both during this conflict currently but also long before that, since 2004 and 2005 this has been going on. So there are instances where you have some kind of emplaced aerial defense architecture, and most of those have been designed to identify and interdict the larger or the more advanced military grade platforms, either manned or unmanned.

They don't have algorithms to detect these low and slow small UAS. And so layering that upon some system that's already in place is immensely expensive. You have problems with something called plot fusion, getting the different detection plots to come together for a commander to even know how to interdict an incoming threat. And then you have all the places in the world that don't have an aerial defense system because until the commercial UAS threat arose and started to normalize, which is sad to say, most security provisions were two-dimensional. We have ballards

outside of sports arenas or concert venues, right? We have nothing in place for aerial defense. So of course, we're talking about irregular warfare in this context, but we also should be talking about gray zone warfare. We should be talking about ways that these groups can attrite the political will and can intimidate populations as well, because that's often how weaker actors will strike at a stronger enemy. A lot of our domestic spaces and our areas outside of active or hot war theaters are also vulnerable to this platform.

And we can't protect everywhere all the time. So I just wanted to add that dimension to the conversation as well, because we have to identify where are the most likely or the most catastrophic targets, if they were to be hit, and how do we siphon the right amount of security resources to focus on those now that we have this new vector of threat? But in terms of using a Patriot missile or sending out a fighter jet to interdict an Amazon drone, it's not sustainable. And we have to see a renaissance in cheap countermeasures.

And there has to be a multitude of them because these platforms are useful in so many different contexts from the urban to the austere. So you need something that can assess a very wide omnidirectional envelope and then you need something else that can work in some kind of urban environment with a lot of reflective surfaces and digital signals. And then you need something mobile that can then work with our soldiers in the field. So we need a suite of solutions and they have to be adaptable and affordable. I think the commercial counter UAS industry

is working on that, but I haven't seen something satisfying to date on that. Hopefully it's coming. One interview that I saw that was very, very poignant was infantrymen coming off of the trench line. Their actual human sensor, their ear, their acoustics was really what they relied on a lot of times so that they could find cover and concealment, et cetera, et cetera. They're also doing a lot of cloaking.

They're cloaking the trench lines, which means they're hiding the signals. They're also using Kevlar blankets. They're doing a bunch of different things that have taken place in order to stay alive, one, but also to defeat the FPV technology and that drone technology. So in a nutshell, that's a very important thing for everyone to understand is that when you hear about we're shooting a missile at something that's, you know, $150, let's say it's $1,000. Well that may be the case, but really that's the kinetic option that has been queued by a detection option. So you see it's indications and warnings and a queuing operation that's taking place to

get you to mitigation. If you translate that to what does a policymaker or decision maker need to understand, that's taking place to get you to mitigation. If you translate that to what does a policymaker or decision maker need to understand, that's it as we talk about the transference from conflict zones to society and how do we protect a stadium? How do we protect a concert? How do we protect a theme park? How do we do that if we don't have counter UAS authority to do that? And so right now, like Kerry mentioned, those venues, you're really not doing anything. Your comment, Bill, about the transference of these changes in warfare coming back into society,

I think that's a really important thing we often miss. And I think it's important for an irregular warfare audience to hear because that component of warfare, we often focus on the conflict theater and the tactical movements in that theater, but that does matter. And I think this is having a profound effect on citizen or civilian psyches because, first of all, it's bringing citizens to conflicts. They're able to see visceral warfare in real time because of the things that are getting published from drone footage, including deaths frequently. Most civilians don't see that, even like CNN wars. They weren't seeing it as, I don't know another better word than visceral, they weren't seeing it as directly. But it's also bringing gray zone warfare and conflict

to civilians in ways that normally conflict has been in these far-flung theaters. For most civilians, of course, if you're in that theater, that's different. So this idea of psychic vulnerability to that is very new. And I think it's piquing a lot of civilian awareness and interest in foreign security policy.

So I'm actually fielding an experiment on American attitudes toward this with exposure to. We have a couple of professionally produced news, breaking news updates about a cyber and a drone attack on critical infrastructure. And then also that whole idea of like kind of pseudo participation in because people feel a general competence with these platforms, they feel like they know how to do war better than manning a tank or a jet. So I think this idea of the effects on society,

the second order effects are going to impact the way we are able to prosecute modern warfare as well, and we can't miss those dimensions. If we're talking about first-person view and working on a wireless connection to a fiber-optic tether to maintain a physical connection, to me, the logical follow-on to that is automation. An asset, an airframe that knows is either pre-programmed on a set route to a set target and knows where to go, or one that utilizes some kind of artificial intelligence to somewhat think for itself, right, and pick its own targets.

So if you could take us into that next step, what could we anticipate from the onset of full automation or the emergence of AI with small UAS? Yeah, that future is here already in its nascent stages, but there's a great way to view it and it's not my intellectual property. This was published in 2015, but there's the idea of human in the loop, human on the loop, and human out of the loop. And what you're describing is human out of the loop, which then brings up ethics questions

that will lead to the Jags to figure out with the generals. But the bottom line is that the capability for human out of the loop is starting to take shape in Ukraine at the tactical level. So initially, we were seeing this at the operational level, even maybe at the strategic level. We even saw some of it in Azerbaijan and Armenia with Israeli platforms that could actually launch and then identify the target without a human in the loop.

And there's ways of doing that. But when you talk about AI, AI is being incorporated into this technology, into these systems, but we're at the very beginning of understanding AI because I think there's three levels of AI. There's AI, there's ASI, and there's AGI. That's where we get into the movie versions of what technology can do when you get beyond simply AI, right? Because AI is about data, it's about multiple search engines putting that data

together quickly and that evolution. But the bottom line is, is that this human out of the loop idea is real and it's happening and that makes it even more dangerous, even more scary. And then when you talk about that capability, and Kerry will talk about it from the non-state actor perspective, if you can get that capability into their hands, it's very dangerous. I think this is more feasible for states at this time.

Bill, you were talking about some of those initiatives, and you're absolutely right that it's probably sometime in the near future that this would be able to be deployed. States, again, though, are more normabiding, and so the ethical question will constrain them more. I've seen several reports about human machine teaming and about how autonomous we want our, quote, killer robots to become. If this does democratize and become available to non-state actors, and certain

features will because they're useful for commerce, they're useful for certain businesses, then I do think that that would lower the barrier of entry and it would make proliferation wider. If it became more sophisticated at cost, of course these groups are going to scoop it up and maximize its potential. But if the AI continues to be military-grade proprietary, I don't think that that would augment these non-state groups in the same way that it would economize data processing and decision-making for state actors. So hopefully that's not a sci-fi doomsday scenario for terrorists yet. So Bill, you mentioned the Jags and

the Generals and earlier you were talking about knowledge of how to modify firmware. I was just wondering as these small UAS have become more integrated into modern conflict, are we in a situation where the youngest warfighters have the best sense of the capabilities and potential of these systems? And also how can we ensure that our senior leaders driving and executing policy at the highest levels fully understand the potential and threat of these systems? Yeah, I mean I would sort of answer that question with a question is does the current tank crew or Bradley crew or artillery crew, do they have the ability to counter an FPV drone at this point, where we're at

in our development of capability? I mean, I don't know the answer. If the answer is yes, that's great. But what we're seeing in Ukraine and Russia, they don't actually have that capability at the tactical level to do that. So the soldier, the small unit tactics are absolutely going to become the experts in small UAS implementation, execution, what works, what doesn't work. I think the actual lessons learned are out there, and I've seen some interviews with

people that have come out of the conflict zones talking about it. One of the really interesting questions that was posed to infantrymen coming out of the Ukraine conflict, they were asked about, what do you do when you hear a drone or what is your action? And their immediate response was, run, find cover. You know, it's the simple human reaction. It's fight or flight. I think the senior leadership, they need to leverage the talent pool at the lower levels.

It's not useful for them to be testing things in the field in order to develop some kind of policy. And comparing the very densely bureaucratic, slow-moving processes of states in terms of technology development and acquisition and deployment to terrorists and violent non-state actors. The terrorist world, they have an urgency to innovate. There's a statistic, I think it was in 2018 that it came out that most terrorist organizations don't survive their first year. And that impetus to innovate, to survive, much less to contend, makes them much more innovative than most militaries and state organizations.

And because we are in this open era of innovation where the commercial industry is keeping pace with, in some cases outstripping the military-industrial complex, and because it's globalized such that that knowledge diffuses so quickly and it rewards these individuals or these groups that choose to tinker and make surprise combinations of things, we have to develop more agility, more scalability in our militaries if we're going to keep up at the pace of modern warfare and how it's changing. So I think one of the policies that senior leadership can implement is encouraging these lower level units to experiments and to find solutions to emerging problems and just unleash them, give them the tools.

Of course, it has to be cost sustainable, but give them the tools to figure it out and stop this mostly top-down, rigid process, let things trickle up. They're going to have to develop a different mindset if we're not gonna get left by the wayside. I'm actually seeing that from individual commanders that I know that are in command of units in different army organizations.

So we're seeing a little bit of that. They're starting to get creative. One example is I met a commander recently who is encouraging the soldiers of the unit to have drone races in their free time and they're doing like unit hosting events where they're competing against each other for who's the best drone racer things of that nature and so to me that's a creative way of commanding that formation to innovate you know the use of the small UAS platform,

because when they have to use it in combat operations, they'll know how to use it, but they're doing it in a fun way. So that we're seeing these sort of things take place, but you're right, Kerry, they have to get creative, they have to get innovative, and they have to push it down to the lowest level and get people excited about, you know,

getting involved with the technology. I just want to ask broadly, you broadly, what are the implications of this conversation for policymakers, practitioners, and academics? One thing that we're not doing, and that policymakers need to understand is that we're not getting our ground game together in order to support an air domain security program. So we have to start at the basics. We have to take our mindsets down to what is the drone vulnerability and risk assessment?

Have we done that yet? Are we truly using technologies like RF sensors, radar sensors, optical sensors to understand the airspace around us? Are we doing that technical reconnaissance? So this is all in the ground game, right? Getting preparation for an air domain event. Are we developing drone emergency response plans? Do our units, our formations, do our people,

security professionals, businesses, do they even know how to react? Do they even know what to do? And then lastly, are we designing, I call it the left of launch, the left of small UAS launch planning? Are we doing the reconnaissance and surveillance plans on what is the potential launch sites? How is the train affecting an ability to fly a drone to our business or our facility? So really, it's almost like a four or five step process, which I call the ground game

We've got to get into the training mindset of this technology prepare ourselves to then be able to detect counter react Inspect payloads. Are we even thinking through the complexities of that? So that one of the footstomps I have is that you know, there are really five steps to mitigation So one of the footstomps I have is that there are really five steps to mitigation. You do a drone assessment, you do a technical reconnaissance of your airspace using a sensor package, you develop your drone emergency response plans, you develop your left of small UAS launch planning and reconnaissance and surveillance, well then you train, rehearse, and exercise. You do all of those things in order to even prepare

for this drone or this eventual air domain event, as an example. I'm glad you went first because I would recommend something similar. I was going to say that we need to policymakers, practitioners first, need to normalize these notions and processes into their routines. There is a document called the Berlin Memorandum that was

developed by the Global Counterterrorism Forum. It's been taken up by the UN and several other states. And that's one of the thing it promotes is developing or integrating assessments and provisions for UAS into routine assessments. So it does need to be normalized. It also needs to UAS into routine assessments. So it does need to be normalized. It also needs to be integrated into those assessments because UAS are one of several threats that could occur at an event or at a location or in a conflict theater.

And so getting tunnel vision and just assessing UAS is not going to be a good solution. We need to find out not just how to deploy them in concert and harmonize those efforts in conflict, but how to counter them as well in conflict and outside of conflict because they can cascade outside of those confines. Those two things in and of themselves are really tall orders. I'm just making it sound easy, like normalize and integrate this into everything that we're doing for security. But in terms of kind of the bigger picture for policymakers, we need to identify to what degree UAS constitutes a threat relative to other threats,

how much of our resource bandwidth we want to devote to it. Because those resources, I know some listeners will scoff and be like, those resources aren't scarce, they're an enormous proportion of our budget. But they are finite. And anytime we take resources to deal with an emerging threat, they're being pulled away from something else. And we need to identify to what degree. And I think it's probably like if you think of a map, it's probably a stippling. There are some locations that need more resources, need higher concentration of attention on the UAS threat

and some areas that can continue to operate without it. So that's what I would recommend for the policymakers and practitioners. I'm a quantitative scientist. We need more data. We need more systematic empirical data. We also need more synthetic data efforts. So we need more gaming and red teaming. We need some way to forecast because this is such a dynamic emerging phenomenon. We have to stay on the leading edge of it by predicting what's coming rather than reacting. You know, Bill, you're left of a small

UIS launch article talks about being proactive rather than reactive. And I think academics could be one of the key groups that could facilitate that by doing rigorous, disciplined, synthetic data programs. We just need someone to commission them and potentially support them, because it takes resources to do those things. But we do have the interest and we have the abilities to do them.

So I would love to see more cross-industry collaboration on this imminent issue. So final question, a little bit more specific. What are the implications, be they countermeasure, renaissance-related, supply chain, or something else? We've talked about so many things, but for the private sector as these UASs and all these various systems are more rapidly materializing in the conflict zones. So I'll address supply chain. One, let's just answer the question, what company in drone manufacturing commands the market? The answer is DJI. DJI sells more drones than any other company in the world.

They probably command 80% of the market as a statistic. And they're a Chinese company that actually that platform is banned by NDAA as a purchase item in the US government. So what does that say about the supply chain? Where does it exist? Where does it reside? When we talk about the conflict in Ukraine and Russia, the predominant platform there is DJI. So one of the big complaints that I hear all the time is, is that this is too expensive for us to even implement or to even think about. And that's a problem, right? If we're gonna actually think about protecting critical infrastructure, protecting mass gathering events,

and all of those things that we want to protect in our country, but pushing forward into conflict zones, the capabilities are there, but the major complaint right now is the supply chain is too expensive to actually make it happen. I think for some companies, they're going to have to decide if they want to enter this world of developing conflict drones because there is a market for it now. Israel has begun

to purchase drones that are specifically tooled for conflict applications. So the defense industrial base will have to embrace the companies that want to get into that aspect, that expression of small UAS. But for those that choose not to, well, I think this is even a bigger issue. The private industry has to increase their awareness of this because just earlier this week,

I spoke to this women and drones group, which is the global executive council, and it's people who are UAS manufacturers, they're service providers, flying UAS, they're pilots. And one of the questions I post to them is how many of you and how often do you think about the malicious misuse or the exploitation of the products that you are designing or using? And use or the exploitation of the products that you are designing or using. And most of the people answered never to sell them at all. So increasing awareness of that and then finding a way to enfold private industry into the solution is that that burden is on security providers, finding a way to incentivize and

reward them for that kind of engagement, because it doesn't dovetail with their profit seeking incentives for the most part. I think secondary to that though, like Bill was saying, finding ways for it to be not too burdensome for them to participate. Those native or inherent solutions like software or the firmware type of solutions, those are the most structural, those are the ones that would be the most effective across the board, rather than a kinetic tactical solution that's already gotten through this funnel.

If you can get something to succeed at the widest bore of the funnel of UAS threats, that's fantastic. That's located more in the regulatory and private sector areas. So if we can find affordable, feasible solutions for private industry to get on board, and it doesn't penalize them so much, you need to have a podcast on whoever

has innovative ideas for that, because that would be clutch in this conflict. The other thing is, if you simply go to Amazon and look for and search for a dropping mechanism for a small drone, hundreds of them pop up at about $25 a piece. So you can modify your drone for $25 and put a release mechanism on it which then allows you to do something with it, right? And the picture is on there, they are dropping packages, you know, wrapped packages and bows

on them and all those types of things, which makes it nice. But really, what is available, easily available, actually. I kind of want to end on a positive note. In terms of modern warfare and irregular warfare, I think small UAS can be such an asset if we harness it. And I also think the solutions to a lot of the problems and threats that we've been talking about, the solutions reside in human ingenuity. And I think it exists. I think we just need to find a way to parse it and to suss it out. So I think in general, you know, we've been talking so much about the dark sides of this

and the terroristic threats and the the looming killer robots But I do think that drones constitute an enormously forward for society Can be an enormous asset in warfare and that we can do this responsibly and Effectively, it will harness the ingenuity that exists in our militaries and in our civil society. Bill, Carrie, thanks so much for being with us and having this conversation with us today. It was fantastic.

Yeah, thank you so much for the vibrant conversation. Thanks very much, Nathan. Thanks, Laura and Carrie for entertaining my comments. Every time I do one of these, I learn so much. And I learned a lot today from Carrie and from everyone and from the questions. And I appreciate being on the show. And thanks for having me. Thank you again for joining us for episode 108 of the regular

warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Our next two episodes will tackle the arguments surrounding creating a separate cyber force and illicit financing within the conflict in Sudan. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare

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