Since 2016, coinciding with operations against the Islamic State group, defense leaders have characterized drones, especially small unmanned aircraft systems, as a significant threat to U.S. military personnel. Small unmanned aircraft systems, for example, are rampant in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, where U.S. forces battle the remnants of the Islamic State group.

These drones weigh less than 1,300 pounds, maneuver below 18,000 feet and fly slower than 250 mph. Their versatility allows adversaries to disrupt U.S. military operations and target personnel, at little cost, thus providing asymmetric advantages.

In 2020, DoD established the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office, known as the JCO, to address the burgeoning threat of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Since then, small UAS have expanded in quantity and lethality, reinforcing the JCO’s pivotal role in helping the joint force mitigate the immediate threat of these capabilities.

At the same time, drones have proliferated across other domains—land, sea and space—and in the U.S. homeland. Given the rapid rise of this deadly threat, the JCO is prepared to help the joint force meet the emerging challenge of all-domain drone warfare.

Growing Concern

Conflicts across Africa, as well as in Nagorno-Karabakh, Gaza and Ukraine, where small UAS have shifted the offense-defense balance, reflect trends that inform the JCO’s mission and imperatives.

Small UAS have proliferated broadly, resulting in a global free-for-all. Contrary to countries that have the wherewithal to buy and integrate large, armed and networked UAS like the Turkish-manufactured TB-2 Bayraktar into their arsenals, nonstate actors, including terrorists, have capitalized greatly on small UAS. These capabilities, such as the Chinese-manufactured DJI, are commercially available, cheap and easily weaponized. Some experts even claim that small UAS allow terrorists to mimic countries’ military capabilities and operations.

Further, small UAS increasingly are augmented with some form of artificial intelligence, stoking fears of drone swarms and “killer robots” that can overwhelm U.S. defenses as well as autonomously locate, track and engage targets. But small drones are not only confined to the aerial domain and conflict zones. Rather, they proliferate across other domains, especially land and maritime domains, and threaten critical infrastructure in the U.S. homeland.

Four Imperatives

The JCO maintains four imperatives. These imperatives allow the office to accelerate capability development while introducing novel operating concepts to meet the challenge of small UAS.

First, the JCO ensures situational awareness across the joint force, and among allies and partners, for the evolving threat of small UAS. Second, this understanding allows the JCO to serve as the “connective tissue” for the counter-small UAS enterprise, ensuring requirements drive flexibly funded and sustained innovation. Third, the JCO uses existing acquisition authorities to accelerate counter-small UAS solutions. Finally, these efforts support warfighters. These four imperatives are explained in more detail below.

Understand the Environment

The JCO developed and implemented a Department of Defense Counter-Small UAS Strategy in 2020. Based on shifts in the operating environment, the JCO is revising this strategy. The new strategy builds off the 2020 strategy in two ways.

First, the new strategy emphasizes “prior-to-launch” mitigation efforts. These efforts are coordinated globally by U.S. Special Operations Command. They are designed to identify a threat early enough to shape diplomatic, economic and lethal activities that target the networks that enable proliferation of small UAS.

Second, the new strategy sets the conditions for the joint force’s movement to a Counter-Uncrewed Systems Strategy. This approach is designed to align capability development to meet the threat of unmanned systems across domains. It also sets broad parameters to calibrate strategic effects, such as deterrence, based on the timeliness of identifying drone threats, the degree of operational standoff and the severity of risk to missions and forces.

Connect the Enterprise

To implement these strategies, the JCO bridges multiple stakeholders.

For homeland defense, the office streamlines policies and authorities across the military, federal agencies and law enforcement to mitigate small UAS against U.S. military personnel and installations. The JCO represents the joint force at the National Security Council, which synchronizes whole-of-government efforts to mitigate the threat of small UAS in the homeland.

In this role, the JCO is designing, funding and administering a tabletop exercise among senior officials this March to study options for the defense of U.S. military installations. This will have implications for protection of other critical U.S. infrastructure, which DoD’s Replicator 2 initiative intends to address. Replicator 2 is designed to improve counter-small UAS protection to critical assets within 24 months of congressional funding.

The JCO also enables integration of counter-small UAS operations among U.S. allies and partners. Based on the U.S. National Security Strategy as well as the evolving threat, the JCO has aligned its outreach toward several combatant commands: Central Command, U.S. European Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and U.S. Northern Command. The office’s outreach has resulted in key gains:

• To meet Central Command’s operational needs, the JCO delivers prototype counter-small UAS capabilities and training; deploys rapid response teams following drone attacks to conduct forensic analysis; and coordinates intelligence support to counter-small UAS operations.

• In Europe, the JCO has assumed a leadership role in synchronizing counter-small UAS mitigation efforts across NATO countries. In September in the Netherlands, the JCO led an operational exercise to validate NATO’s counter-small UAS doctrine. Similarly, the JCO has facilitated integrated fire control with the U.K., which enables greater bilateral cooperation.

• Through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the JCO advises Taiwan’s armed forces on counter-small UAS, helping shape a country-level strategy that further supports regional security across the Indo-Pacific region.

• The JCO also cooperates with the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit to support Northern Command’s requirements for protecting U.S. military installations and critical infrastructure. The unit accelerates the military’s adoption of commercial technology via contracts to innovative businesses and startups. Small UAS increasingly are used in the U.S. homeland, presenting “a safety and security risk to military installations and other critical infrastructure for the foreseeable future,” Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of Northern Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2024.

Accelerate Solutions

The JCO, partnering with the U.S. Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the Defense Innovation Unit, as well as the military services, advances counter-small UAS solutions to provide needed capabilities to war-fighters faster.

Since 2021, the JCO has led multiple demonstrations with industry to inform development and procurement of counter-small UAS capabilities. Over the course of several demonstrations across the U.S., for instance, the JCO tested the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, a laser-guided rocket, for effectiveness against small UAS. These demonstrations encouraged the Army, Air Force and Navy to purchase service-specific variants of the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, thus providing a less costly way to mitigate small UAS.

However, there is no silver bullet against small UAS. The JCO uses existing acquisition authorities to establish a layered defense against small UAS. This is designed to protect multiple echelons across multiple domains and against multiple types of drones. A layered defense approach calibrates nonlethal and lethal effects against small UAS based on their bearing, altitude and range from U.S. military personnel and installations.

Support the Warfighter

Layered defense consists of three interlocking tiers of protection. The first defensive layer attempts to maximize operational standoff against small UAS and consists mostly of nonlethal capabilities. One example is the JCO’s sponsorship of electronic warfare capabilities across the services, such as the Navy. This and similar passive effectors confuse small UAS, causing them to malfunction before hitting their targets.

The next layer, calibrated based on the updated bearing, lower altitude and shorter range of small UAS, achieves a “soft kill” against adversarial drones. This layer consists of microwave weapons as well as high-energy lasers, such as those mounted on Army Stryker combat vehicles in Central Command. Together, these solutions are designed to fry the internal components of small UAS, destroying them before they impact their targets.

The final layer achieves a “hard kill” of small UAS. This final protective fire consists of the integration of direct-fire weapons systems. These include mounted and dismounted machine guns, as well as smaller, more affordable missiles such as the Coyote, which is enabled by Ku-band radio frequency radars.

These layers are synchronized by Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control, which the JCO helped fund. Given the compressed response times imposed by small UAS, the JCO also is shepherding the integration of artificial intelligence into Forward Area Air Defense Command and Control. This will further optimize counter-small UAS operations by allowing operators to rapidly generate targeting options for commanders’ decisions.

To protect U.S. military installations and critical infrastructure, the JCO has encouraged a similar systems-based approach based on ruggedized, modular and scalable defensive systems and payloads, which informs the Replicator 2 initiative.

Campaign of Learning

To sustain these efforts going forward, the JCO is conducting activities across doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, facilities and policy. These initiatives will allow the joint force to respond to anticipated and unforeseen threats, including drones across other domains and in the U.S. homeland.

The JCO is pursuing a campaign of learning consisting of future studies and war games that inform counter-small UAS for large-scale combat operations and within the U.S. homeland. These insights also will shape the JCO’s Capability Portfolio Review. This document updates the joint force on the counter-small UAS enterprise and identifies warfighting gaps. The information provided by this document is critical to drive recommended materiel and nonmateriel solutions to address these gaps. Thus far, this review process has reiterated the need for a Next Generation Counter-Small UAS Missile.

The JCO also is partnering with the U.S. Army’s Fires Center of Excellence, as well as the FBI, to facilitate training at the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft University at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and the National Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Training Center, planned for Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. This ensures that the military, as well as law enforcement and allies and partners, have common situational awareness of the threat, understand available response options and gain a mastery of tactics, techniques and procedures.

Drones will continue to threaten U.S. military personnel and installations. While the JCO is instrumental in enabling the joint force to mitigate the acute threat of small UAS today, it also is integral to preparing the joint force for future challenges. The JCO sets the conditions for the joint force’s response to the emergence of unmanned systems across other domains, including in the U.S. homeland, which will shape the future of drone warfare.

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Maj. Gen. David Stewart is the director of the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office and the Department of the Army Management Office-Fires, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training, Headquarters, Department of the Army, the Pentagon. Previously, he served as commanding general, 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Fort Bliss, Texas. He has extensive leadership and staff experience from a variety of assignments throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific. He has two master’s degrees in strategic studies, one from Canberra University, Australia, and one from the U.S. Army War College.

Lt. Col. Paul Lushenko is the chief strategist for the Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office. Previously, he served as an assistant professor and director of special operations at the U.S. Army War College. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a 2005 honors graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York, and holds a doctorate in international relations from Cornell University, New York. He is the co-author of The Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions.