WASHINGTON—At the vast, windswept White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico earlier this year, nearly a dozen military contractors armed with laser guns, high-tech nets and other experimental systems met to tackle one of the Pentagon’s most vexing counterterrorism conundrums: how to destroy the Islamic State’s (IS) increasingly lethal fleet of drones.
The militant group has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for more than two years. An increase in deadly attacks since last fall—mostly targeting Iraqi troops and Syrian militia members with small bombs or grenades, but also threatening United States advisers—has highlighted the terrorists’ success in adapting off-the-shelf, low-cost technology into an effective new weapon.
The Pentagon is so alarmed by this growing threat—even as it routs the IS from its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria—that it has launched a $700-million crash program overseen by two senior Army generals to draw on the collective know-how and resources of all branches of the armed services, Silicon Valley and defense-industry giants, like Boeing and Raytheon, Challenge, to see which new classified technologies and tactics proved most promising.
The results were decidedly mixed, and underscore the long-term problem confronting the Pentagon and its allies as it combats the IS and al-Qaeda in a growing number of hot spots around the world beyond Iraq and Syria, including Yemen and Libya.
“Threat targets were very resilient against damage,” the Pentagon agency assigned to help crack the problem, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization, said in response to questions from The New York Times about how the contractors fared against mock enemy drones. “Bottom line: Most technologies still immature.” The agency said some of the technology might work well with “adjustments and further development.”
In the meantime, the Pentagon has rushed dozens of technical specialists to Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan to help protect US troops and to train and, in some cases, equip local allies against the drone threat, which has killed more than a dozen Iraqi soldiers and wounded more than 50.
The aircraft, some as small as model airplanes, conduct reconnaissance missions to help IS fighters attack US-backed ground forces. Other drones drop bombs or are rigged with explosives to detonate on the ground.
“These things are really small and hard to detect and, if they swarm in groups, they can overload our ability to knock them all down,” said J.D. Johnson, a retired three-star Army general who previously commanded the threat-defeat agency, and now heads Army programs for Raytheon. “The threat is very resilient and well-resourced, and we have to be looking one or two moves ahead to defeat it.”
US troops are using an array of jammers, cannons and other devices to disrupt, disable or destroy the enemy drones, often quadcopters rigged with explosives. And the military has increased air strikes against IS drones on the ground, their launch sites and their operators.
“This isn’t just an Iraq and Syria problem; it’s a regional and global problem,” Lt. Gen. Michael Shields, director of the threat-defeat organization and one of the two generals overseeing the effort, said in a telephone interview. “These are airborne IEDs [improvised explosive devices].”
Indeed, the drone threat is going global. Iranian drones have buzzed US Navy ships more than a dozen times in the Persian Gulf this year. In Europe, US and allied soldiers accustomed to operating from large, secure bases in Iraq and Afghanistan now practice using camouflage netting to disguise their positions and dispersing into smaller groups to avoid sophisticated Russian surveillance drones that could potentially direct rocket or missile attacks against personnel or command posts.
In the US, authorities voice increasing concerns about possible IS-inspired drone attacks against dams, nuclear power plants and other critical infrastructure.
Over the summer, the Pentagon issued classified guidance to base commanders around the country to warn local communities to keep commercial drone hobbyists away from installations.
Earlier this month, an Arabic publication offered guidance from the IS to its followers on how to evade US drones. This past week, the IS released through its Amaq news agency a video of an operation in which its fighters tracked what it identified as a Syrian news media vehicle and then dropped a munition on it.
“There’s a DIY [do it yourself] aspect to this,” said Don Rassler, a researcher at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which has studied IS drones.
Image credits: USAF Photographic Archives/Wikimedia Commons