NDAA Takes On Counter-Drone Challenge

The FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – the conferenced version of which has passed the House, is due for a vote today in the Senate, and is likely to be signed into law by the President – has taken some important steps in tackling the threat of adversary drones operating against our military, in both foreign and domestic airspace.

The military will be able to protect key U.S. facilities. The Federal Aviation Administration announced earlier this year that it considers federal law prohibiting the shooting down of aircraft in U.S. airspace to include the shooting down of drones, meaning the average citizen can’t shoot down a drone hovering over the back yard. One would have thought (or hoped) that there would be an obvious, unambiguous exception for the United States military preventing drones from flying over domestic military installations, perhaps trying gather intelligence, or worse.

Apparently not, or the NDAA’s language on this subject would have been unnecessary. Section 1697 remedies this ambiguity by explicitly authorizing the Department of Defense to take certain actions to “mitigate the threat…that an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aircraft poses to the safety or security of a covered facility or asset.” Those authorized actions include tracking the drone, warning the operator, disrupting or seizing control of the drone, and/or using “reasonable force to disable, damage, or destroy” it.

It just makes sense that our military should have the authority to protect its own facilities from drone incursions. ISIS, Hezbollah, and others are using drones on the battlefield, and authorities in several countries have raised concerns about terrorist groups using drones to attack domestic targets, or using drone surveillance capabilities to support attacks by other means. It would appear that to date, French authorities have still not identified or apprehended who was behind a series of unauthorized drone flights that took place over various sites in France in 2015, including nuclear plants, military installations, and the U.S. embassy.

Significantly, the NDAA definition of “covered facility or asset” is limited to those relating to the U.S. nuclear deterrent, U.S. missile defense, or the military space mission. While those are certainly critical places to secure from drones, the authority to prevent such incursions should really apply to all military facilities located within the United States – that should be a first-order item for the House and Senate to address in the 115^th Congress at the earliest opportunity.

Exploring opportunities with Israel on directed energy solutions. One of the challenges associated with bringing down adversary drones is that many of those being deployed against our military and our allies, particularly on the battlefields of the Middle East, are comparatively less sophisticated than our hardware and cheap to produce.

This gives rise to a disadvantageous “cost-exchange ratio”, or the cost of each exchange that involves one of our weapons bringing down one of theirs. When the enemy is launching weapons in our direction – be they drones, rockets, or other projectiles – that cost far less than our counter-measures cost us, that’s something we literally can’t afford.

Israel knows a lot about this subject. The average cost of a single Hamas-launched Grad rocket, fired from Gaza into Israel in 2012, is roughly one thousand dollars. The average cost of a missile fired from the Iron Dome missile defense system, to bring down a Grad rocket: roughly one-hundred-thousand dollars, each. And aside from rockets, the Israelis are now also contending with terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas launching drones into Israeli airspace, in some cases making it deep into Israeli territory.   

In what would appear to be an effort to tackle this problem with a partner that has experience facing similar threats, Section 1274 requires the Department of Defense to produce a report on the potential for cooperation with Israel on the development of “potential for cooperative development by the United States and Israel of a directed energy capability to defeat ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, mortars, and improvised explosive devices that threaten the United States, deployed forces of the United States, or Israel.”

Directed energy weapons are weapons that fire energy at targets to incapacitate or destroy them, in the form of either microwaves or lasers. The solid-state laser form of directed energy weapon has been operational on board the USS Ponce in the Persian Gulf in the form of the Navy’s Laser Weapons System (LaWS) since the end of 2014, to address threats like small attack boats or aircraft in the area. The Navy estimates a cost of 59 cents per shot from LaWS.

Cooperation on directed energy with Israel could yield important benefits for both countries in confronting the challenge of adversary drones. It’s extremely encouraging that Congress recognizes this opportunity – hopefully the findings of this report can be acted upon quickly in the coming year.