Countering the Swarm: America’s Drone Deterrence Strategy

🎙️ At the Boundary reaches its 100th episode with a critical conversation on one of the fastest-growing threats in modern warfare: drones. Host Jim Cardoso is joined by Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell to explore why the U.S. must urgently rethink its counter-drone strategies—before it’s too late.

From the looming risk of a Taiwan conflict to the rise of low-cost Chinese drones, this episode examines:

• Why expensive missile defenses are unsustainable against cheap drone swarms
• The need for layered defenses and operational resilience
• The role of sensors, directed energy weapons, and low-cost interceptors

If you care about national security, emerging military technology, or the U.S.’s ability to compete in great power conflict, this episode is a must-listen.

📍 Recorded at the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute (GNSI) in Tampa, Florida.

Links from the episode:

• Register for CyberBay Here!

• Countering the Swarm: Protecting the Joint Force in the Drone Age

At the Boundary from the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida, features global and national security issues we’ve found to be insightful, intriguing, fascinating, maybe controversial, but overall just worth talking about.

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The mission of GNSI is to provide actionable solutions to 21st-century security challenges for decision-makers at the local, state, national and global levels. We hope you enjoy At the Boundary.

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Transcript

Jim Cardoso: 0:00

Jim, hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director at GNSI, and your host for at the boundary. Today, we're proud to announce that at the boundary reaches a significant milestone. Our 100th episode. According to industry data, less than 6% of all podcasts reach 100 episodes. As we celebrate this achievement, we're also grateful to let you know that at the boundary is among the top 10% of all podcasts according to the podcast search engine listen notes, I could speak for our entire at the boundary and GNSI team when we say thank you for spending some time with us each week since November of 2023 we're looking forward to hitting milestones for 200 episodes, 500 episodes and beyond. For this 100th episode, we have two great guests lined up. We're going to discuss a fascinating new article from Dr Stacey pehn and Molly Campbell, both with the Center for New American Security, titled countering the swarm, protecting the joint force in the drone age. At GNSI, we've talked about drones and other autonomous or semi autonomous systems frequently on this podcast, also our September 2023 Tampa summit was devoted to the future and ethics of unmanned and autonomous warfare. So today, I look forward to speaking directly to Stacy and Molly about their article. They write that the US must swiftly and drastically alter its counter drone strategies or risk losing a war, say to the Chinese over Taiwan. Stacy is the director of CNS defense program, and Molly is a research assistant in CNS defense program as well. Stacey and Molly, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 2:03

Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here on your 100th episode.

Jim Cardoso: 2:07

Yeah, exciting for us, too. And I mean, I really look forward to having you, and after reading the article as well, it's a great way to celebrate 200th episode. So before we get into the specifics, and there's a lot of analysis going on right now in national security circles about drones, autonomous warfare. What inspired you to devote the time and the effort to put into this really well researched and fascinating article,

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 2:31

as Molly would say, drones have been on the brain for a while. This is a stream of research and sort of the third publication that we have on drones. I first wrote a report on Ukraine, and then Molly, Hannah Dennis and I had a larger report called swarms over the straight which was thinking about offensively, how drones could be used by China, the United States and Taiwan, if the US and China were to get in a war over Taiwan and trying to extrapolate the lessons learned from recent conflicts like Ukraine, Nagorno, Karabakh, Libya, as well as Molly, did a bunch of work creating a drone proliferation data set looking at military drones. Molly, why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Molly Campbell: 3:20

Yeah, so it tracked military drone sales, which I called transfers, because, you know, they're not always necessarily a direct sale. Sometimes it's, you know, illicitly acquired technology sharing, also like interest and then failed sales, but it's basically 30 years of drone proliferation data and kind of to track who were, who are the major players in the market. I think there was a major narrative that China was like the great us competitor with military drones. But I but the data set really showed how Turkey and Israel, to a lesser extent, are major actors and proliferators of military drones. So it's, it's been a, it was a really cool project, and I'm hoping to maybe build on it in the, you know, subsequent years that I since it's been published.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 4:09

Molly's being modest, so she did all this, all size drones, all previous data sets, which were great, had focused on only the big drones, like the Reapers, of the predators, the males and Hales and she expanded it to include all military drones. And what we concluded from this is that drones are everywhere, and everyone's getting them. And this data set didn't even include commercial drones, which are a whole nother threat vector, which any actor can get a hold of just by going on Amazon or go to your best buy, and buying a DJI Mavic and bringing it home and modifying it and can use it for nefarious purposes. So we had focused on the potential offensive uses in drones in this prior work. And then here, what we had left with was that drones are going to be everywhere. We need to really. Be thinking hard about how we're gonna defend against them, because China, in particular, has one of the largest and most active drone programs in the world, and dominates the commercial drone market.

Jim Cardoso: 5:10

Yeah, you know. And you, you know, you 3035, years, 1995 1990 whatever I mean, I was in the I ended the Air Force in 1988 and I retired in 2018 30 years. And I was on a separate podcast called tipping Spears about two weeks ago, and she asked me, What is one of the major things you've seen change over your career? And one thing I said was drones and autonomous warfare. When I came in in 1988 we weren't even thinking about that. I'm sure there's some R and D going on that area, but it really wasn't until late 90s, and obviously after 911 that's when things just really exploded. They became ubiquitous. But even, like you said, the con it was, the discussion was more about as an Air Force guy, MQ ones, MQ nines. And now it's a completely different discussion with that addition, like you said, of the commercial activity, which can be then used for dual use, for military purposes. So one thing too, I think that the I pulled from the article we talked about a little bit about this yesterday, as we kind of had a had a chat, is kind of the, I would say, the offensive prioritization you've seen in the past, and really now what your article focused on is the defensive needs, which maybe aren't getting as resourced as well. Can you talk to that?

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 6:29

I'll let Molly talk to the specifics on the resourcing. But in general, I think you've seen this. The big lesson learned people are taking from Ukraine is drones are important. We need to have drones and thinking about how we can use them to better go out and attack the enemy, whether it's making you know your ground based fires, your artillery shells, your rockets more accurate by just providing up to date targeting information, or if it's actually directly attacking them with the one way attack drones that the first person view little kamikazes, or the longer range first attack drones like the Shah heads that have seemed to be everywhere now. And you know, the Department of Defense Secretary HEG says, issued his unleashing drone dominance, which sounds very offensive minded, and certainly is. But then they recently issued an order to establish a new task force, a joint task force for a one that is going to be focused on drone defense. And you know, this is a very welcome development, I think, in our view, but the devil's always in the details in terms of what they actually do, because there have been prior organizations that have been focused on countering small drones and Molly can tell you a little bit about what we've been spending our money on and why it is insufficient due to the growing threat. Yeah.

Molly Campbell: 8:01

So the US investment in countering drones kind of dates back to the global war on terror, unsurprisingly, in the Operation Inherent Resolve. So with the liberation of Mosul, when ISIS first used small I think that believe DJI commercial drones to drop bombs on us advisors and Iraqi forces in the city and guide one way explosive vehicles. And it really was this kind of watershed moment in which the US could not counter this threat. And they really came, they had, they came up with, you know, they mounted a jammer onto a onto a truck and drove it around the city, and that was ultimately how they figured out how to counter it. But, you know, reading firsthand accounts of that, it was this really scary moment that the Iraqi forces wouldn't go into the city, and that kind of galvanized at least in CENTCOM, and the idea like, oh, this could, like, really suppress our forces. So Jido, the joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, which is again focused on the IED threat, was kind of given the COAs mission because, again, it was kind of more seen in that vein of rogue actors using this kind of improvisational technology. And they got a joint Urgent Operational need funding. They used OCO funding to kind of surge, more conventional, conventional air defense systems, but also some more innovative solutions. So the land based, land based phalanx weapon system, which is the sea was mounted onto a truck, you know, proved really effective at countering the small drones to shoot them down. But overall, you know, so there was a huge spike in spending about in 2018 but a lot of that money was still spent on traditional air defense for so pack three interceptors for the Patriot system. And not a lot was kind of forward looking at to how are these drones going to be used in future iterations? And. Not necessarily by a non state actor. What could this mean, like in a large scale war? And so there's a major spike after that, and then a lull covid, you know, things were not being funded as much. And then the war in Ukraine, once again, I think, as Stacey alluded to, really brought this into relief, that this is a large scale modern threat. And part of what did happen in 2018 was some R and D investment and some purpose built cus technology. So that's like the coyote missile interceptor and some of the more mobile, short range air defense systems that the Army and the Marine Corps have. And around the same time that Ukraine is happening, some of these R and D investments are coming to fruition and beginning to fruition and beginning to be procured and fielded. However, it's still an incredibly small numbers, and it's not sufficient for the scale of the threat that we will see in the future. So, and it's also they're based on antiquity, antiquated systems such as like the stinger. A lot of these systems are based on the Stinger, which is not very effective against drones, though it's what we have. So there was a little bit of using existing systems and kind of creating these hodgepodge short range air defenses to apply them against drones, with some limited investment in purpose built systems. But again, C, U S is often kind of grouped in with the broader air defense mission, and that consumes a lot of the spending with like reconstituting army, shorad, major really expensive interceptors, in the case of the Navy, with the SMS,

Jim Cardoso: 11:36

well, you talk about one thing you brought up there, which actually I'm curious about, because you talked about the a lot of, a lot of focus on the ad mission, the ad forces. And one takeaway, as I read through the article, and you, you guys, you hit it up as well in the article, is that counter drone is not an ad problem. It's an everybody problem. And you know, you sort of Molly, you sort of highlighted the fact a lot of times the spending goes, okay. We need to do these things for ad forces. But, I mean, you illustrate throughout the article at pepper, you know, it kind of filters to the whole thing that now counter Joan is something we need to think about across our entire joint force and even across our our partner nation forces as well. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit.

Molly Campbell: 12:21

Yeah, I think the spending that went towards So, like so like handheld to UAS systems, it really didn't start until 2022 2023 it's been a very recent, very modest investments, as they kind of dabble in different handheld systems, different like soldier protection. And I think that is where the army, for example, is moving. I think the Marine Corps is more that's more inherent to their force structure, to have a little more defending the individual unit versus dedicated air defense,

Jim Cardoso: 12:53

but more mobility too. I mean, you know, they're gonna they pride themselves on being more mobile. You know, as part of their overall

Molly Campbell: 13:00

army is a bit more siloed, but they're moving towards that. But I think that that's something that's come up a lot, and, you know, right? There's individual protection in terms of having these handheld systems that are often only really effective against group one and two drones, right? They're like handheld jammers, or maybe it's an enhanced, enhanced buckshot, for example, to shoot down a drone with a with your rifle. Um, but that's something we do, you know, kind of find is we need more of this, like small level, mobile point defense, to defend, you know, the force,

Jim Cardoso: 13:37

yeah, yeah. No, that, that's, that's good. And Stacey, I don't have anything to add to that or,

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 13:42

I mean, Molly hit on the key points. I think that you see that the army recognized the threat, and the Joint Force did, but not really the scale of it, that everybody, any adversary, is going to have drones, then you're going to have to protect everyone, and that means that air defense units, even with the Army expanding that that sort of specialty within the whole force is going to be inadequate, and one of the most common sense solutions, because guns are ubiquitous. All troops have different types of guns. Most vehicles do for ground forces are gun based defenses, and that the Ukrainians have used them to great effect to take down the shaheds. And if you take a gun and create some purpose built ammunition that has a proximity fuse, so it creates an air burst and it's more likely to hit a very small drone, perhaps provide it with a little guidance, it can be really, really effective, still very cheap, and you just need to have either a laser designator or hook it up to a radar. And you can create your own spag, your own mobile gun, and having those that are accompanying ground troops, and then, you know, personalized versions of them, I think, is going. Be necessary for all of the services the Air Force is gonna have to worry about its base defenses. The Navy already has dealt with a lot of drones and has realized that while the Aegis defenses that the fleet has are fantastic, they are optimized for a high end threat, and that there is a gap sort of between the ccwis and their standard missiles. And that, you know, improving the and using the five inch cannon more means they can intercept the threats farther away. But they need, they need some more of those purpose built counter drone defenses.

Jim Cardoso: 15:41

Yeah, no doubt. You know, on a side note, I, you know, I see GNSI here. We're at a university, and sometimes I catch a lot of griefers when I use military acronyms. And just listening to you too, it's like, okay, I understand what you're saying. But around here, a lot of people wouldn't understand what you're saying. Good stuff, though. Back to the article. So, you know your article, it sort of breaks down the counter drone issue into three main buckets, and investment for the department to make, for current drone threats, investment to make for future drone threats, and then overall recommendations and all these. Now you present all of them in kind of a need to do now urgency to them, but since it's right kind of in our national face, let's discuss, first, what needs to be done about today's threats that you know to what? What do we need to do really right now to counter things that are that are basing us on the current battlefield?

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 16:36

Sure, so we focused on overseas, because counter homeland defense is a different problem set, given the authorities are different and the type of weapons you would want to use. And I think it's helpful to talk a little bit about what the Army and the Navy have been doing from 2023 since Israel ended up invading Gaza and about mid 2025, this year for the Navy in terms of defeating drones, because the army was under continuous attack for about six months, the bases that they were stationed at in Syria and Iraq, and then the Navy has been operating in the Red Sea and Houthis, which are proxy Iranian forces in Yemen had been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in response to Israel's actions, and the Navy came in to try to defend these ships and to defend itself, because they came under attack. And so there's been a lot of experience recently in shooting down drones, and all props to the Army, the Navy and the Air Force who've been involved in this, because they've done a great job. It's pretty astonishing. The success rate that all of the forces have had in terms of no drone has hit us. Ships, the army, forces that were not trained or specialized air defense, or air defenders, shut down 80% of the more than 100 drones fired at them. But these operations have highlighted some real problems and limitations to the current approach. Number one is the fact that the US doesn't have enough sensors optimized to find drones. So one of the hard things about drones is they're small and they're they fly sort of slow and low, and most of the equipment the military has is focused on finding fast flight or jets or missiles. And so the drones are hard to see, and you have to see them before you can do anything about determining whether it is a threat, and then trying to stop it, you can either shoot it down, maybe you jam it, you screw up its control link or its navigation system, or, you know, otherwise, disrupt its operations, so they need more sensors to deal with that. The other factors that really played in were inadequate numbers of interceptors, of affordable interceptors the army was like shuffling around from base to base, and they were only able to do this because it was a really otherwise permissive environment. You know, they weren't under attack in Iraq and Syria, other than these one way drone attacks, which occurred almost every day, but it was only a couple of drones every day, so it was a pretty modest threat. And that's true for the Navy too. The Navy's real problem is they've got a great air defense system, but they're firing off, you know, missiles that cost five to $30 million to shoot down a drone that costs$50,000 and that's just not sustainable. It's not cost effective, and it's wasting the inventory of really valuable weapons that we should be conserving for greater threats and more priority threats like China or Russia. So using like the Standard Missile six to shoot down a drone is just. That's not what you want to be doing, and going forward, it it's, I think there's a real is, or maybe there isn't a realization, but Molly and I realized that the type of threat that the US has been facing in the Middle East was pretty low, and our forces did really well, and it was still unexpected and hard and something they hadn't been prepped for before they were deployed. But you're already seeing the threat grow in terms of what the number of drones Russia is firing into Ukraine on any given day or in any given raid or salvo. You know, it's hundreds, 500 800 that would really quickly exhaust us supplies of interceptors and overwhelm air defenses. So we need to be prepared for the threat to grow pretty significantly in the near term. And that's why you have to find cost effective solutions. And they're looking at this across the force, in addition to the guns, you know, improving the ammunition for the Navy's five inch cannon, specific ammunition for different ground vehicles. You also have counter drone, drones that are out there, and like the Air Force, started using it a rocket instead of an air to air missile to intercept the drones, because a lot of the ones have been shot down by fighter aircraft, either Air Force or navy, who have gone out, and the missiles are still pretty expensive. So, yeah,

Jim Cardoso: 21:30

no, that, I mean, you know, I some some takeaways from, from that's great answer, you know, sort of the IFF the Identification Friend or foe. You kind of talked about how it's sort of a manual process, and I think we'll get into a bit later that that's going to have to that that's gonna have to change as well, just the cost of defenses, shooting half a million dollar missiles at at, you know, drones that are a 100th of that cost. And you know, you quoted from the battle of the Red Sea. You quoted a navy leader said, Well, if it's defending our people doesn't matter. The cost doesn't matter. And, okay, yes, I agree. Until the cost is so overwhelming because they're shooting hundreds of drones at you, then it does matter at a point. And then you have to make risk assessment decisions as well. And then, you know, like, like I said, Well, Molly and I realized, and hopefully more people realize too, by listening to this and reading your article, that you know this the way we've operated, with one to two drones maybe be shotting at us, shot us per day or or one per hour, anything like that. That's not going to compare to hundreds of drones coming out our forces in a future fight.

Molly Campbell: 22:39

So go ahead, please add that. I mean, in the case of the Army, it wasn't without injury and loss of life to US forces right three US forces lost their lives at Tower 22 and there's been, there's an innumerable amount of like, traumatic brain injuries from when drones have made impact. And again, this is just from a very modest threat, like, you know, a threat you need to respect, but still very modest compared to what's being seen in Ukraine.

Jim Cardoso: 23:05

Yeah, oh yeah, what's in Ukraine, and what we can kind of prognosticate what's going to be seen in the future as well. And in fact, you know, turning to that, your article talks about that. So we've, you know, talks about the, you know, how US invests for the current drone threat, but then you also talk about how the US invests for the future drone threat, and sometimes the US we like our exotic solutions to problems, but some of the technology is important to be brought to bear towards the future drone threat, as you've already alluded to. Can you kind of talk a little bit more about that future drone threat and where we need to where we need to invest

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 23:39

sure all of the drones we've been talking about thus far, and the types of attacks, even the huge ones, like Russia's launching pretty frequently into Ukraine, are autonomous drones. But they're not autonomous really swarming drones in that they're communicating independently with each other and modifying their behavior. So to me, a real swarm involves autonomous collaboration, where the collective optimizes its behavior to achieve its mission, and that's going to be even more difficult to defeat. And we've seen that China is investing a lot in swarming technology. The Ukrainians and the Russians are as well. The Ukrainians reportedly have made some advances in this area, sort of modest steps, not fully autonomous swarms recently, and before we know it, there will be truly autonomous drone swarms that will be even harder to defeat, in addition to just massive raids and salvos being fired, and that's where the US needs to be thinking about using technology to help to defend itself, because most of the solutions that exist today, with the exception of like jamming, which typically will work against commercial drones and some military. Drones. But there are different ways that you can respond to that and make your drone less vulnerable to jamming. Are take out one drone at a time. So right? You have to find it. You find it in the sky, you engage it, you shoot it, and it falls down. And you have to do all of that in a really, really compressed timeframe, so 30 seconds to a couple minutes, and that's likely going to shorten even more if you're going to have to be re aiming to engage multiple drones very quick, in very quick succession. Due to that fact, the US is, there's it will need layered defenses so they can sort of thin out the size of the attack, but some are probably going to get through and this is where something like directed energy weapons could be really useful, especially high powered microwaves that essentially fry the electronics of everything in its area. They're really short range, they can potentially fry the electronics of things you don't want them to damage or destroy, but they're kind of like your last layer in your force field, and they are the only sort of defeat mechanism that can take out an entire swarm. And they've shown good promise in testing. By comparison, I think the US military Molly's analysis shows has invested a lot more in lasers, which is another form of directed energy. Those are still you have to aim and then train the laser shooter, yeah, and keep it there for a while, because sometimes it takes a little bit to burn through it and actually damage it. And those haven't performed nearly as well when they've been deployed in the field. They've had a lot of problems because of weather, because of just atmospheric sand, dust disrupts them.

Jim Cardoso: 26:50

Lasers overall, have not really, in my opinion, have not really played out the way we sort of envisioned they would 10 or 20 years ago.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 26:58

Yeah, I don't, I don't think they have. And so we we argue that HPM seems like the more promising tech. And then the other piece is actually, as we're talking about the threat becomes fully at autonomous and collaborating the US needs to be integrating more artificial intelligence in its command and control network and its battle management to speed up its process of identifying a threat, engaging it, and using AI algorithms that can, you know, verify that this is a threat and be drone that and do it really, really quickly and faster than humans can, so that they can keep up and actually knock most of them down.

Jim Cardoso: 27:43

Yeah, it seems that AI, that one, the military does seem to understand the the importance of AI for a variety of functions and operational capabilities. The high power microwave, that's the one. And I found it interesting, and you said it again, and it really left out a left up the pages as well, the articles. That's really the only one that can defeat the swarm, that can do, you know, a broad range of because everything else is pretty much point and shoot, and you're not going to defeat a swarm that way. And look, there's some terms. I was writing these terms down. There's some terms that probably make people uncomfortable. You know, the autonomous, swarming, collaborative, the collective, people kind of probably freak out a little bit when little bit when they hear that, but that's where this is going, and we need to understand that and be able to take some type of activity in those layered defenses, as you say, far out, medium, closer in, so that we can just, you know, sort you know, reduce this, reduce the swarm As it comes in, so that finally, at the end, it's, it hopefully is of minimal damage to our to our forces fielded Molly, before you look like you had something you were looking at.

Molly Campbell: 28:50

I think what's interesting is, on the on the lasers note, Israel just had their iron beam testing. So there is some, and they do state that they're allegedly This is a it's more hardy against environmental factors. So I just thought that was interesting, that perhaps there is some more mature laser technology that the US has not yet despite the millions of millions invested. But the point about swarming still exists, and that this is still like laser still has the issue of dwell time and re aiming that makes it ineffective against swarms.

Jim Cardoso: 29:25

Oh yeah, I'm just, like I said, lasers in general. I I'm a, you know, AF sock Special Operations most of my career. And they always, we always thought putting a laser on a c1 30, an AC 130 gunship laser, was going to be the way to go. And they've been working on and working on and working on, and they they still haven't figured out even the most current AC 130 the you know, the whiskey model, or the J model. I'm sorry, it's still pretty much all just kind of old fashioned kinetics, so no de on there. Yet, they still haven't quite figured that out.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 29:58

Jim, if I can jump. In on one point you made about autonomy and making people uncomfortable. And I agree, and you know, we have serious concerns about some types of autonomy where you have a fully autonomous weapon system that goes out, figures out what it wants to strike, determines that something is a target and engages it without any human oversight. But there are a lot of more sort of founded forms of autonomy that already exist today in many weapons, as I'm sure you you know, and in particular in the air defense systems like the patriot and Aegis, they have autonomous engagement capability because they have to, because the speed of decision making has to be so fast. And the same is true for counter drone defenses. I think on the offensive side, there are autonomous drones, but they're really sort of cruise missiles that are pre programmed and flying to a certain point we are going to, I think, see more sophisticated forms of autonomy, whether we want it or not, because there is an operational imperative. You see this on the battlefield in Ukraine with all the jamming. There are two different solutions. One, really low tech. You go to a wire guided drone, which the Russians started doing and have used quite effectively, but that has some fairly serious limitations and drawbacks. And the other side is at least autonomous autonomous terminal guidance. And that's not a fully autonomous drone. It just takes it sort of the last mile. And when I was in Ukraine, I saw a number of different companies that were developing this last mile systems, which were sent essentially a module you put over the camera of the drone, and the operator clicks on a pixel, so it's essentially a pixel lock, and then the drone is going to continue its flight. If it's severed and the operator loses control of it, it goes to that pixel. It's not at all sophisticated, but the operational environment is going to, I think, push towards the autonomy due to the counters that people use. It's a cat and mouse game.

Jim Cardoso: 32:05

Yeah, you have to do it that. I mean, that capability you just described is not very different from Lost link procedures they use on an MQ nine right now. A lot of similarities there, and that's which they have been doing for 1520, years already. So, yeah, things are just moving so fast here that we need to accept these advanced capabilities and incorporated them, because our adversaries certainly aren't wringing their hands wondering whether this is a good idea or bad idea or not. And we need to be able to defend against that, and we need to be able to offensively employ as well. And then we'll see, you know, we'll see more about, you know, collaborative combat aircraft. Ccaas are becoming a big thing now. It's another discussion we may have someday. But today's about counter drone. So continuing discussion about counter drone, um, you hit on this already, but I want to circle back to it, because you devote two you have six chapters and two chapters, 33% of your articles about those. There's two case studies, you know, the army, counter drone operation, Middle East, the Navy, the Navy's and the Air Force of battle, of the of the of the of the Red Sea. We're not going to get into details of that, because we're trying to keep this at about 30 minutes, like we do with all our at the boundaries even our 100th episode. But people need to dive into the article and see, see some of those details of the lessons learned. You've touched them already, but I want to circle back just ensure there's nothing else that kind of comes to mind that you want to talk about, some key pieces from some teasers, if you will, to those two lessons learned that readers can then dive into when they download your article themselves.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 33:41

Two things, one from each case. So for the army, the story is a fairly human one. It's focusing on one of the brigades that was deployed, the second BCT of the 10th Mountain Division. And I think that leadership played a really important role here. And sort of there had been a few drones shot at the prior unit that had been deployed, and so they had prepped for it, but nothing on the scale at which the second brigade faced during its deployment, and but those preparations helped, and they had to delegate A lot of authorities down and empower junior soldiers, because it was folks who are at isolated locations who had to make these decisions to shoot down or drones really quickly. And they experimented with a lot of tech, and, you know, learned a lot in the process, but that was really important there on the Navy side, you know, the Navy didn't have any leakers that hit ships or American naval ships, but what you see is that they were operating pretty continuously for a year and a half or so, and that really seems to have worn the fleet down. Was having the stress and being prepared for an inbound threat with pretty short notice was something that ended up leading, or at least contributing to some accidents that happened because there were three fighter aircraft that were lost. One was a friendly fire incident, so it was shot, I think, by a cruiser or destroyer, I forget which one fell off, the carrier slid off and one crashed. And so I think there is an element of what we would call a Fabian strategy of exhaustion, where the enemy isn't actually going to be able to defeat you and even necessarily harm you, but they really can wear you down and deplete your resources in terms of missiles, air defense, missiles and interceptors, but wear down your people over time, because you never know when you're going to need to respond. Molly, do you have anything else you wanted to

Jim Cardoso: 35:57

Yeah, that's, you know. It's, it's, you know, it is interesting. I drew that out too, and I really appreciate that how you talked about a lot of the Human Factors still matter. I mean, the technology is important, but the and both those are and both those case studies, and you just hit on those Stacy is the human factors of how the technology is going to be employed, and also just good old fashioned things like, like leadership and empowerment of subordinates and and fatigue and stress levels. You know, I think that some of the technology that we employ, you know, in terms of command and control, things like that, are going to have to mitigate those human factors that have existed since the beginning of warfare and haven't changed any over the over the the Eon, since we started, since we started throwing rocks at each other. So we're starting to come towards the end of the episode. So you right at the beginning of your article, you have and you talked about it through the article was the overall recommendations to the department, kind of the you list the big three. So you know, as we're starting to wind down, can you describe them for our listeners again, to give them a little teaser to dive in and learn more about them.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 37:03

Sure, our biggest recommendation is that US forces need to be operationally resilient. And that seems like a sort of arcane terms, but it means that you can be under attack and continue to conduct whatever your task is or your mission is, and resilience is going to require the type of active defenses we talked about, where you have guns or missiles that can shoot down incoming threats, but it also requires protective measures. So sometimes it is simple things like passive defenses, having a hardened bunker that people can go hide in, distributing people and equipment like aircraft across the base, don't park them next to each other, because then they're more vulnerable, and that makes the task harder. If, even if you're facing something like the spider's web attack that the Ukrainians launched on Russian air bases, if your aircraft are spread out, it's harder to hit all of them. So resilience is really important, and it requires both passive and active defenses. And those the passive defenses are really modest investments, but the department always seems reluctant to make them, and it will help oftentimes, against higher end threats too, like the missile the missile threats that the US is likely to face in any theater. We think they need more low cost interceptors, large stockpiles. So you know what it really comes down to? We've seen how bad the department is in terms of stockpiling large numbers of its high end missiles. It needs cheaper things, and it needs to buy a lot of them. And hopefully this might involve Congress authorizing multi year procurement, so you can put a big order for multiple years, and industry knows and they'll expand their production capacity and you can buy them. But I think guns, rockets, sort of those low end things are a big part of it. Some of them might be the new tech, like HP, like high powered microwaves.

Jim Cardoso: 39:05

Well, you talked about training as well. I mean, just like counter for counter drone training and kind of expanding that, again, beyond just the air defense folks and also testing. I mean, some of the basic stuffs of training and testing are a big deal that and you, you know, articulate some, some examples, especially the testing side, which is not very robust, it seems.

Molly Campbell: 39:27

Yeah, I can talk about the testing. So some, when we talk to some of the second BCT folks that were out in the Middle East, they talked about, you know, they were given a few developmental systems that were, you know, in low rate of production that had not been really thoroughly tested in the homeland, because there's this mattering of restrictions, particularly on directed energy, on EW and even just on kinetic testing at ranges around the United States. So they just weren't really. Thoroughly tested. They were used against assembly drones that weren't hardened. So they really, there was kind of a false confidence in the developers and in even the force giving them these capabilities that when they put them against, you know, Orion made drones, yes, they are cheap, but they are still fairly effective, and they are military grade weapons that they just didn't, they weren't up to snuff. And that that, you know, is a risk if we're, you know, spending a lot of money to develop and test products that then when we put out and give them to the warfighter, aren't effective. So that was kind of a big recommendation that we had, of like, we need to think about how we intensify testing conditions? And I mean, I think we're also like modifying that recommendation to give to congressional leaders so, you know, see how different domestic regulations can be shifted, how they can work with the new task force, to kind of maybe have a purpose UAS testing facility, and that was in head success memo, I believe, to find a, you know, or identify a purpose cuas testing range. So there are steps towards this. And even folks from industry say, like, yeah, we want to test these more rigorously, so that, you know, our soldiers aren't out there up a creek without a paddle. But so they're like, oh, this should be great. And then it's, you know, ineffective, and then

Jim Cardoso: 41:25

it's not great, yeah? I mean, you need to test time. It's, it can be a challenge, though, sometimes there's limited range, time, limited capability, yeah, but it's, it's necessary. I mean, you make that very clear in the article. So as we sort of the the quarter in our jukebox, to use another antiquated phrase, starts to run out, uh, besides another PSA, to read the full article, which I've made and I'll make again. Any final thoughts from both you before we click off, Molly, I'll start with you. Any final thoughts?

Molly Campbell: 41:50

Yeah, I think just that, you know, in many ways, cuas isn't unique in terms of, when you think of it from like the budget and bureaucratic side, like a lot of different missions are impacted by lack of production, you know, not being scaled at the rate necessary, and that the forces are just generally ill equipped, you know, so that this is still kind of victim to the bureaucracy of the Department of Defense, but that this threat is, I is perhaps less considered as much, I think, just in the from the defensive capacity, and that there are these less glamorous solutions, such as passive defenses, like nets, camo, decoys, things that you know aren't, again, a very exquisite, um, high end solution, but that can be really effective at saving American lives that, you know, maybe we need to look back at some what, what do we have, and how can we build on what we have to be effective in the short term, and, you know, even in the long term, I think that's my, my main That's

Jim Cardoso: 42:55

a great thought. Whatever works, right, we need to employ that. Some of it's going to be exotic systems. Some it's going to be very simple, but we need to look at and find the thing that does work, and just consider that. Stacey, any final thoughts from you before we end the podcast?

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 43:08

Just to expand on some of the points Molly made, a little bit, I agree completely we need this high, low mix. I think that, and I firmly believe drones are going to be this threat, and they are a growing threat, but it's and it's going to mean that US forces are going to face more risk. It's because suddenly adversaries have an ability to fairly accurately strike the US from long distances, and they didn't used to have that. So that's just a fact of life now, and not something we can reverse, but the counter drone threat right now, it's not impossible. The US has done really well in situations where it didn't have the right weapons, the right sensors, or well trained forces yet in place and capitalizing on our advantage in personnel and then equipping them and preparing them for this. You know, it's not going to be dire if we take the steps that we really need to and can, because so many of the solutions are readily available right now and are not, you know, cost prohibitive. The US just needs to actually do it and take it seriously.

Jim Cardoso: 44:22

That about wraps it up. Stacy Molly, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn: 44:28

Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Special.

Jim Cardoso: 44:31

Thanks to our guests today, Dr Stacy pettje on and Molly Campbell from the Center for New American Security. Stacey is the director of cnsi defense program, and Molly is a research assistant in that program. We really enjoyed talking to them today about their new article, countering the swarm, protecting the joint force in the drone age, which is freely available on the CNS site. Next week, on the podcast, our guests will be GNSI Research Fellow, Dr Guido Rossi, and Dr Matthew Ford. From the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm, they'll have an in depth discussion about something that'll seem as far away from high tech autonomous weapon systems as you can get the US Army's standard issue rifle. The army is on the verge of changing it, and you may be surprised to discover that the effects of that change are far reaching and a little controversial Tune in next week to discover why. Thanks for listening today. We're glad you could share some time with us on this milestone, 100th episode of at the boundary. We hope you stick around for the next 100 as well as we progress down that path, you can follow along with GNSI and our LinkedIn next accounts at USF underscore GNSI And check out our website as well at usf.edu/gnsi, while you're there, subscribe to our monthly newsletter to keep up with everything we're doing at GNSI. That's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary. You.