Yes, rates of significant drone kills have dropped measurably because of counter-drone technology, but they’ve also done so because of changes in tactics, techniques and procedures.
Next, with urgent demand and increased budgets for new technology significantly escalating, market forces took over. Today, there are few large defense companies that don’t have a C-UAS system under development, and the diversity of solutions is breathtaking. To that end, the further development and use of overlapping technologies to detect and defend units are significantly increasing the probability of defeating drone attacks.
Most pressingly, drone-on-drone combat enabled by artificial intelligence is currently within reach. Swarm attacks from both enemy UAS and missiles can overwhelm many, if not all, manually controlled defenses. Humans are simply unable to process dozens of targets simultaneously, and the relatively limited number of defense systems that can handle multiple targets are prohibitively expensive.
As we saw with the attacks from the Houthis, Hezbollah and Iran in the ongoing Israeli conflict, Israel’s and Ukraine’s defenders have been hard-pressed to address all incoming attacks, and the costs have been staggering — which means cheap counter-drones, produced at scale, enabled by AI are the most promising technology to defeat an offensive drone threat.
In many ways, AI-enabled UAS could mimic air force tactics developed soon after the invention of the combat aircraft. There would be intelligence gathering, attack and bomber drones for the forward battlefield, interceptors to warn of inbound attacks and fighter variants for aerial combat. Thus, AI-enabled drones will undoubtedly be a potent 21st century air force, augmenting, if not replacing, a human in the cockpit — a capability that’s dangerously inexpensive and no longer exclusive to nation states.
This is not to say that UAS are already obsolete. The use of drones in Iran were impressive but relied more on surprise than on a revolutionary technology. And recent attacks in Ukraine have relied on mass rather than invincibility, demonstrating Joseph Stalin’s dictum that “quantity has a quality all its own.” But they just have not — as some breathless analysts proclaim — changed the fundamental character of modern warfare, and one can expect swarms of AI-enabled drones augmented by ground-based lasers can provide an effective and low-cost method to defeat swarms of incoming drones.