Small drones have become a big threat. A foretaste came in January, when Islamic militants attacked a Russian air base in Syria with thirteen small drones armed with explosive warheads. Though Russian defenses managed to intercept the robotic intruders, the attack suggested that drones can be the poor terrorist's smart bomb. And if a ragtag group of rebels could mount a swarm attack using home-made drones, what could Russia or China do?
Yet the U.S. Army may be ill-prepared to stop swarm attacks, according to a new U.S. National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report. While the army is planning for threats such as drones in terms of terms of decades, the threat is already here and will get worse in the next few years.
The study focused on the threat from—and defense against—small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). In particular, researchers examined the danger to dismounted U.S. Army and Marine infantry formations of battalion-size or smaller, which lack the transport and power generation capacity for sophisticated counter-UAV defenses.
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