Defeating the Drone Threat
This transcript is made possible through the sponsorship of Schneider Electric
Maj. Gen. R. Scott Jobe:
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to our panel today on "Defeating the Drone Threat." I'm
Major General "Frag" Jobe, I'll be moderating for today, and we have an excellent panel. We have a
limited amount of time, but we're going to dive straight into it.
So for our panel today, we've got Mr. Reva Reeves with Elbit Systems that is on stage right on the far
side. Mr. Bart Olson to my right is from Northrop Grumman Working Future Concepts and Mr. Mike Holl
from RTX is with us today. The United States remains the most formidable Air Force on the planet, but
we've faced ever evolving threats and changing operational environments. All those come with
challenges to include identification of threats and how to counter things en masse. Maintaining an
advantage requires us to transform and continue to exploit vulnerabilities of the threat. Specifically in
the drone environment we're going to talk to today.
We've seen it all over the planet, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria. It's emerged and it's prevalent throughout
conflict. So for today we'll talk. The framing of this, we'll be focused on group one, two and three UAS
systems. We're going to also frame it in the Indo-PACOM Theater, which brings unique challenges for
distance and time, and we'll talk about those from design equipping, agile combat, employment, cost
trade-offs, doctoral decisions, command and control for all the effectors that we're going to discuss
today. So as we build up that framing, I'm going to open up to the panel for opening remarks and
introductions. So Reva, if you want to kick us off, I appreciate that.
Col. Brad Reeves, USAF (Ret.):
Yeah, thank you sir. Thank you for choosing to invest your time to be with us here to discuss this
important topic. No AFSC is immune from the drone threat. Look, the rise of the drone threat, it's
culminated in this watershed moment in history that's built up as general job mentioned from the
Ukraine war, the Israeli war, what's happening in Yemen, and now today, Tower 22 and Jordan, I want
you to grasp this, Tower 22 is the first time in over 70 years that US ground forces have been killed by an
air attack. I want you to let that set in for just a minute. This is unacceptable. As Airmen, we should feel
a bit of righteous anger, but also of course do something about it. I want to share a short video with you.
It's from the Israeli War. It's footage released by Hamas from a camera underneath one of their drones,
and it paints a picture of a framework that I want to offer up to us today as a way to think about this
new threat.
Listen, drones are the modern day IED. These low cost, readily available, inexpensive weapons can
thwart multimillion dollar tech. They can wreak havoc on our forces on the ground. And like IEDs, there
is not one magic solution. It will take a multi-layered approach leveraging both soft and hard kill
capabilities. On the soft side, of course, we have signals intelligence to detect the threat. We have
electronic warfare to jam RC and GPS signals. We have RF cyber takeover, which is a pretty interesting
sophisticated technique where we actually take control of the enemy drones. And so you can imagine
the fun we can have with that, put their weapons inbound back on their noggins. But of course soft kill
effectors aren't in and of themselves enough. We also need hard kill effectors. And you know what
these are? We have guns, high energy lasers, high power microwaves, the list goes on.
But also like IEDs, the threat continues to advance. And so today we're facing dark drones. These are
drones that do not emit an RF signature. So our traditional counter UES systems cannot detect or jam
them. Think autonomous drones or drones that navigate visually without the aid of GPS. We of course
