Drones being used by the military is not a new concept. The United States Armed Forces began using drones during World War II in 1939. From that time on, drone research and development were primarily for military use. During Desert Storm in the early 1990’s, the United States relied on drones heavily for surveillance. Over the next decade, US military drones greatly advanced from offensive surveillance tools to missile laden defensive weapons. The drones developed for the US military are highly sophisticated, expensive devices. In 2018, the US Department of Defense requested almost $7 billion to support their drone program.

As the largest military force in the world, The United States Armed Forces also has the largest drone program. Once the US began utilizing military drones, so did their allies and enemies. But what has truly changed the scope of drones in the military is how inexpensive and easily attainable small drones have become. For under $1,000 a small off the shelf drone can be purchased. In the wrong hands, these drones can be used to spy on sensitive American assets. These same drones could be used as kamikaze drones to cause explosions like the ones used to attack the Saudi Aramco oil processing facilities in 2019. So now, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has begun developing anti-drone programs.

DARPA has been developing drone defense systems for some time now. They have developed systems that can track and eliminate enemy drones. However, these systems are made to identify and eliminate enemy drones much like the drones the US military uses in combat such as the Reaper or Predator. Small drones can easily pass under the radar of DARPA’s systems. Earlier this year DARPA announced at the 20th annual C4ISRNET Conference that they would be implementing a new drone security program that targets small hard to detect drones.

In the new program, titled Aerial Dragnet, DARPA explains that since small drones can fly at low altitudes, under the cover of buildings and urban terrain, and at slower speeds, they are very hard to see tactically. “In future urban battlegrounds, U.S. forces will be placed at risk by small UAS which use buildings and naturally-occurring motion of the clutter to make surveillance impractical using current approaches,” states the program outline. “The rapid proliferation of commercial UAS with increasing endurance and payload capacity drives the need for a future urban aerial surveillance system that can detect, track, and classify many different UAS types at longer ranges in urban terrain.” The outline goes on to explain, “This program seeks to develop systems for threat-agnostic non-line-of-sight (NLOS) surveillance which exploit and adapt to the fundamental physics of the threat and the urban environment.”

At the virtual C4ISRNET Conference Paul Zablocky, a program manager with the DARPA Strategic Technology Office told participants that DARPA plans to surveil for threatening drones with drones. Using drones with specific sensors on them to create an aerial dragnet. For fishers, a dragnet is a wide net that is dragged across a swath of water to haul in whatever is below. Using a network of drones, DARPA plans to “drag” an invisible net throughout urban environments to nab any unauthorized drones. DARPA explains that “The system requires a network of surveillance nodes, each providing coverage of a neighborhood-sized urban area, mounted on tethered and/or long-endurance UASs. The Aerial Dragnet system will provide a continually updated common operational picture (COP) of the low altitude airspace (i.e., below 1000 ft). The COP will consist of geographically-referenced tracks of all small UASs, labeled as friends or foes, within the coverage area.”

Zablocky revealed that DARPA began testing the aerial dragnet program in 2019 in San Diego, California. Zablocky said he was surprised as to just how much clutter the aerial dragnet picked up in San Diego. After that first urban test, DARPA returned to the lab to work out any kinks in the system. With a refined signal processing algorithm, DARPA is now testing its drone sensing drones in Rosslyn, Virginia. The Aerial Dragnet program was first proposed back in 2016. Part of the proposal stated that the program will conduct a 3 year trial before implementation. Based on the timeline information that Zablocky presented, it seems that DARPA is right on track to implement an operational drone dragnet system shortly. Once again, proving that when it comes to drones, the United States is at the top of the game both defensively and offensively.