For its part, the U.S. Army created the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office to address the proliferation of adversarial drones. The JCO came about after then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in 2019 designated the Army as the executive agent for counter-UAS activities.

Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey serves as director of that office, and he spoke with C4ISRNET in September about what it takes to protect American interests against drones. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

The Army’s Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, focuses on counter-UAS capabilities. How is that effort going?

We’re going to transition what we’re doing at Yuma [Proving Ground in Arizona] into Fort Sill, and that process is happening right now. We’re starting to get the classrooms. They’re starting the program of instruction development. We’re working with the joint team across courses to make sure we’re maximizing all the [program of instruction] capability.

Will the center’s curriculum focus on different types of counter-UAS strategies, such as kinetic options versus electronic warfare options?

The curriculum will cover all of that. You’ll have an “operators’ course” that will really introduce operators to the spectrum of counter-UAS capabilities that are out there, really focus in on the systems the Army’s currently fielding at divisions and the other services are fielding at their sites or locations.

We’re really excited for our “planners’ course” because, right now, we really don’t have the planning or understanding of how to employ counter-UAS capability from a planner perspective, and that’s going to be a critical piece. That’s probably the course that’s going to be stood up first because, right now, as we’re putting capability out in our installation site, one of the biggest challenges is installation commanders having a planner that they can look at to do the employment of the capability and then lay out all the planning factors with it.

You recently talked about the need for more widespread knowledge across the force on counter-UAS systems. What is the JCO doing to facilitate that dissemination of training and knowledge across the entire force?

The first thing we did was put out a strategy. The strategy was really the first document that we put out that framed the problem for the entire enterprise. Then we put out a handbook based off what we’re doing forward in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility, capturing all the lessons learned. We not only provided that for the CENTCOM area of responsibility, but globally to all the combatant commands.

Right now, we’re on our fourth JKO [Joint Knowledge Online] module. If you go to JKO online, there are four modules there that span from operator-level familiarization all the way through policy implementations of employing counter-UAS capability. They’re actually really good modules, and we’re seeing a lot of interest out there.

Are those modules a requirement?

It hasn’t been updated as a requirement, but my assumptions are, as we continue to move forward and continue to mature, the counter-UAS training requirements will become a requirement in the future. Right now, it’s available, and we’ll find that with soldiers who are preparing for preemployment training, most are more likely to leverage it.

One of the most recent rounds of U.S. assistance for Ukraine included the Vampire system made by L3Harris Technologies. The Pentagon called it a counter-drone system, but L3Harris didn’t advertise it as such. What’s the working definition of counter-drone at the moment?

If you look at some of our capabilities that we’re having a lot of success with in theater now, they weren’t put over there for that purpose. We’ve essentially maximized the capability in that system to give it a dual role, whether it’s taking down rockets or mortars; they now can take down drones. That’s just a natural evolution in the capability because the threat is so prevalent and so large.

You can’t have just a c-UAS capability everywhere. You’ve got to be able to leverage whatever capability you have. So yes, I would tell you that anything that has the ability to take down a drone may not be classified [as c-UAS], but will be utilized in our system-layered approach.

What safeguards are used for autonomous technologies?

At least right now, the human-in-the-loop piece is going to be there until there’s continuing comfort in the ability of a system. But you can start building autonomy without actually having somebody push the button. You can get to the point where it detects, and then the operator does the final push, the effects piece. At some point, that’ll be a strategic decision: When do you want to fully autonomize the ability to let this system shoot? Especially in the future you have things like swarms and other types of threats coming in at you and need to be able to rapidly respond to some of the capabilities.

Some of the autonomy will more than likely have to be built in here, but [the question is]: How far do you go with the autonomy? I don’t think right now anyone is suggesting that we walk away from the system and just let the system do it itself from a defeat perspective, but we’re still looking to leverage technology that can get us there. Eventually, we’ll start having those policy discussions on how we move forward with the autonomous defeat.

How have lessons from the war in Ukraine shaped — or are currently impacting — decisions within your command?

What we’re seeing is what we’ve expected. We’re seeing that the EW capability we’re using works well. We see the kinetic ability working well. What it’s reemphasized is the threat’s ability to leverage drones and UASs to their advantage. If you don’t have a robust capability inside of your force, integrated air and missile defense system, a layered integrated approach with the common [command and control], you’re going to have challenges against these threats; and having it all the way down to the operator level to be able to respond at the operator level.

We’re seeing all of those types of trends employed and reinforcing what we need in order to ensure we’re doing [the right thing] as we continue to move forward and shape our forces.

Although autonomous vehicles have slowly made their way into the commercial realm, the Pentagon’s efforts to build robotic vehicles have been almost two decades in the making. For its part, the Army considers combat vehicles a top modernization priority.

Winners from the competition will deliver the first prototype units by 2028, according to Maj. Cory Wallace, the robotic requirements lead with the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team. In the meantime, programmers are taking a new look at how they will test the technology before it hits the battlefield, and that could include taking lessons from the civilian world.

“With the RCVs, we are looking at such new systems and new approaches,” Wallace said in an interview with C4ISRNET. “A lot of the testing procedures that are currently employed are not the most efficient.”

Military combat vehicles have historically needed to pass certain benchmarks, such as a specific number of test miles driven. The robotic vehicles, which are intended to be autonomous, might not need to pass the same thresholds, he said.

Instead, Wallace said, the service could look to certify the vehicles in a virtual environment as opposed to actually driving the vehicles the same number of miles required for regular combat vehicles. Testing and evaluation metrics might also look to companies already in the autonomous vehicle space to see what could be replicated in the military sphere.

Programmers have “been very open to try new means of testing,” Wallace said. “We’re trying to draft [off] what we’ve done in the civilian world, as well, to see if we can gain efficiencies by implementing their testing standards.”

Over the next five years, the Army plans to spend nearly $750 million on developing light robotic vehicles, according to fiscal 2023 budget justification documents. While the bulk of the funding will go toward developing the robotic platform and its control system, the Army will run a second acquisition program in parallel that focuses on software and building out autonomous capabilities that will eventually be added to the platform.

When testing the software capabilities, Wallace emphasized the need to develop a method that looks at changes between iterations rather than checking each line of code. If programmers get bogged down in evaluating the software’s code, he said, the program could lose momentum during the certification process.

By separating out the software acquisition pathway, the service aims to develop software-centric capabilities that can support any future robotic combat vehicle configuration, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the Army’s program executive officer for ground combat systems, told C4ISRNET.

“A core element of the program that we’re executing is about establishing the base-vehicle architecture and the base-software architecture so that you can come in and subsequently add capabilities as modules of software that don’t require you to go back and test every other module of software to verify that it still functions appropriately,” he said.

The Army has sought to develop three types of robotic vehicles — light, medium and heavy — to use as scouts or escorts for crewed fighting vehicles, beginning with the light program.

Surrogate prototypes of both the light and medium versions underwent testing this summer at Fort Hood, Texas. However, in the spring, the service said it would first focus on smaller platforms and defer work on medium vehicles.

According to Brig. Gen. Geoffrey Norman, the director of the Next Generation Combat Vehicles Cross-Functional Team, the Fort Hood testing and future experiments help examine the range of capabilities that fit with a light vehicle versus a medium platform.

Once those experiments lead to refined requirements, the team will start on a specific program focused on medium-sized vehicles, Dean said.

Autonomous vehicles remain a long-time goal, both in the commercial and military sectors. At a panel held by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at Colorado State University on Wednesday, researchers and officials looked at the challenges standing in the way of vehicles capable of full autonomy in any environment.

“There’s a lot of technological barriers,” said Lt. Col. Chris Orlowski, who manages the Army office responsible for executing the hardware and software programs for robotic combat vehicles. He said some that are often overlooked include “our safety.”

This summer, the Army tested different types of robotic combat vehicles at Fort Hood, Texas. During the exercise, soldiers tested RCV platforms’ capacity by driving them on various terrain conditions commonly encountered on the battlefield. The tests also looked at the vehicles’ ability to identify and avoid obstacles and their capacity to fire weapons while moving.

Although the tests were considered a success, fielding truly autonomous vehicles is still years away. At the Fort Hood testing, a safety observer followed every platform in case of an incident during each exercise, according to Orlowski.

“We need to move away from that, especially when we want to field these provably safe systems in the future,” he said.

In recent years, autonomous vehicle ventures from companies such as Tesla have started to break into the commercial sector. This summer, regulators in San Francisco gave a robotic taxi service the green light earlier to begin charging passengers.

The rollout of robotic vehicles in a military capacity has been much slower. Although DARPA, the Pentagon’s research agency, has been working on self-driving vehicles for close to two decades, military robotics vehicles have to deal with a problem not found in the streets of San Francisco and other U.S. cities: the lack of roads and disarray expected on battlefields.

On regular streets, robotics vehicles have to account for expected obstacles like pedestrians, garbage cans and mailboxes. Meanwhile, the battlefield presents a whole host of different obstacles.

“You have to figure out how other things are moving and if they’re really adversarial, that makes it all the more difficult because maybe they want to move in a way that doesn’t make it easy for you to figure that out,” said Deva Ramanan, the director of the Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research.

Outside of safety precautions, the Army also needs to examine its contracting process for robotic vehicles, Orlowski said. While it’s one thing to set up budgets, he said that it’s another to start leveraging authorities and signal to the defense industry that it’s time to start developing products.

The Army said this month that it is preparing to make future decisions on the potential acquisition and use of unmanned systems in combat by conducting additional soldier training and evaluation sessions with RCV platforms over the next 36 months.

When the vehicles are eventually brought to the battlefield, Orlowski said that he sees the technology being parceled out on an individual unit basis to augment the unit’s capabilities rather than putting them together in a group formation.

The Army lacks force structure to give every company, battalion and brigade electronic warfare capabilities or systems to counter drones. This gap could be filled by providing one or two autonomous vehicles with those capabilities to units, he said.

“I think where they offer promise is the ability to bring payloads that we can’t put on a manned platform today because we don’t have the size, weight power, capacity to do so,” Orlowski said.

As part of a $3 billion package for Ukraine that the Pentagon announced Wednesday, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment system is a portable kit that can be installed on most vehicles with a cargo bed for launching the Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System or other laser-guided munitions.

The L3Harris-made weapon ― a small, four-barreled rocket launcher and sensor ball ― can be mounted in two hours and operated by a single person, the company said. It can be equipped with missiles to hit ground or air targets including unmanned aircraft systems.

“The Vampire system itself is a counter-UAS system, ” said Colin Kahl, undersecretary of defense for policy, said at a press briefing Wednesday. “It is a kinetic system that uses small missiles essentially to shoot UAVs out of the sky.”

While the Vampire system isn’t advertised as a counter-drone weapon on L3Harris’ website, Ukraine has used similar munition-style weapons to take down drones throughout its conflict with Russia.

As the Russia conflict crosses the six-month mark, the most recent aid package is aimed at providing sustainable and affordable options to Ukraine. Alongside the Vampire, the Pentagon is also sending Puma drones and a host of ammunition.

“Our VAMPIRE system will provide the Ukrainian people with even more robust capabilities as they continue to defend their country and democracy in Europe,” Melbourne, Fla.-based L3Harris said in a statement to C4ISRNET. “We will continue to offer our steadfast support of their mission.”

Drone warfare has been heavily utilized by both sides in the six-month-old conflict, with many being sourced from countries outside the war.

Kyiv has drawn support from the U.S. and the United Kingdom, both of whom pledged new drones and counter-drone technology to the conflict on Wednesday, Ukraine’s Independence Day. Russia, meanwhile, has looked to Iran to sustain its supply of drones, according to U.S. officials.

The Vampire is part of a larger package in aid to Ukraine, bringing the total amount supplied to the country during the Russia-Ukraine conflict to more than $13.5 billion since the start of the Biden administration.

The Biden administration selected the Vampire — a low-cost and easy-to-assemble weapon compared to other counter-drone measures, such as electronic warfare technologies — for a package advertised as providing supplies for Ukraine’s long-term needs.

“We’re trying to be very deliberate about what systems we think makes the most sense for Ukraine to have in that context, and it also matters very much: Can they sustain it? Can they afford it? Because of course billions of dollars of international assistance may not be something 10 years from now or 20 years from now,” Kahl said.

When the Pentagon did not disclose which “Vampire” system they were sending to Ukraine, it fueled to speculation on social media on as to what weapon the Ukrainians were set to receive. L3Harris confirmed evening that the system in question was the rocket equipment.

The rocket launcher isn’t the first weapon nicknamed after the creature of the night to enter the conflict.

Footage published by the 10th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine on July 11, shows Ukraine using the Czech Republic’s RM-70 VAMPIR 122mm Multiple Launch Rocket Systems.

The Czech system, which is designed by Excalibur Army, looks similar to the the L3Harris’ weapon, with a rocket-launching system as the main feature. Unlike the L3Harris system, the MLRS Vampire uses a large military vehicle rather than a simple pickup truck as its launching platform.

“Ukrainian MLRS Vampire aren’t afraid of sunlight,” the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a Tweet accompanying the video. “They are not afraid of anybody; they’re just doing their job.”

During the Trump administration, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis created the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force to examine capability shortfalls and address what the department head saw as decades-long gaps in the equipping and training of close-combat units.

While leadership of the task force now falls to the Army rather than the defense secretary, the initiative continues to look at shortfalls across multiple services’ small units.

With AI the name of the game in the Pentagon’s ongoing modernization efforts, the 4-year-old task force is turning to academia and industry leaders to regain a competitive edge in close combat and examine how the military can leverage autonomous technology to address small units’ priorities.

“We are transforming the joint force by integrating next-generation technologies and war-fighting concepts,” Col. Shannon Nielsen, the task force’s director, said in a statement. “[This] enhances our ability to compete globally, deter adversaries, and win on all-domain battlefields at the small-unit level.”

The mission of the task force is twofold: to increase the lethality of close combat soldiers while decreasing causalities of U.S. infantry members.

Part of the initiative focused on identifying and developing options for investment that include “more lethal and discriminating individual weapons systems, while recognizing the imperative to lighten load for infantry squads,” according to a memo put out by Mattis.

In 2020, Mattis’ successor, Mark Esper, directed the Army to take control of the task force, citing the branch’s large share of infantry and special operators. The task force moved its headquarters to Fort Benning in Georgia.

“We’ve gotten smaller and leaner since we arrived in Fort Benning,” Ed Agee, a principal program analyst with the task force, told C4ISRNET.

The force, which still includes members coming from multiple services, is now looking toward AI and robots to fill in infantry squads’ capability gaps. At the end of July, the force hosted the first meeting of the Artificial Intelligence for Small Unit Maneuver working group at Fort Benning.

Building on the task force’s mission of improving lethality for small units, the group is particularly interested in providing autonomous and AI technology to close-combat troops in the Army, Marine Corps and special forces.

Participants at the event witnessed technologies that might eventually hit the battlefield, such as a four-legged robot, or “dog,” and small unmanned aerial vehicles. The event was part of the Army’s “10x platoon” experiment, which tries out technologies to upgrade infantry forces for the decade ahead.

“We’re pushing the edge of the envelope, thinking outside the box,” Agee said.

Although the robots and autonomous technologies tested at the event were unarmed, Agee said he could see the beginnings of the transition to armed capabilities based on the remote technologies witnessed at the event.

Different technologies could find homes in different services depending on the capability gaps each service has within its small units. The Army, for example, views the “dog” as a top priority, Agee explained. The four-legged robot could be used to scout a building or location that might come under fire, taking the place of a soldier.

Meanwhile, the military’s special forces are prioritizing technologies that allow a command’s platforms to operate in denied airspace where adversaries might block communications or network access, Agee added.

The working group included operational end users who previously saw in combat. At the event, they had the opportunity to provide feedback to engineers, industry personnel and academics in attendance about the technologies tested and what improvements or changes they would like.

By Aug. 31, defense leaders from the services will provide the task force with a list of capability gaps for the Army, Marines and special forces. From there, Agee said, the task force will turn to industry leaders and academics to brainstorm ideas about what AI technologies help meet those needs.

“If a technology shows great promise, and it’s successful with development, and the decision is made to make it a program of record, it would go through … an accelerated version of acquisition,” Agee said.

He added that the decision to accelerate an acquisition timeline depends on the promise of the technology and what shortfall the technology can address.

The working group, including the task force, meets monthly with members of the joint AI community.