Counter UAS Systems Tested Against Swarms of 50 Drones in Latest Yuma Exercise

July 30, 2024

The U.S. military has used unmanned aircraft for decades to perform dangerous reconnaissance and attack missions that save lives, but the importance of small unmanned aircraft systems (s-UAS) is growing with each passing year.

As the technology proliferates, America’s adversaries could potentially use sUAS to target U.S. service members, necessitating robust counter-sUAS (C-sUAS) defenses for use anywhere American forces may be deployed.

The Joint C-sUAS Office, established in 2020 to tackle this threat, has hosted industry demonstrations of the latest C-sUAS technology at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) for the past three years. Their most recent event, the fifth held here, took place over four weeks in June, and was the most ambitious yet, focusing on demonstrating systems capable of detecting and defeating swarms of sUAS. Of nearly 60 proposals, 12 systems were selected for demonstration by the JCO, and nine participated here.

“We have up to 50 targets in the air simultaneously,” said Hi-Sing Silen, Test Integration Manager for the JCO. “Those include rotary-wing, fixed-wing, fast-mover jet engines and propeller-driven group threes, all coming at you from almost 360 degrees. It is as hard as it can be for a system trying to defend itself.”

The event is believed to be among the largest demonstrations using a mass sUAS attack scenario conducted to date.

“As far as I’m tracking, this is the first time the DOD has flown this many threat targets in the air at one time,” said Silen. “In other swarm demonstrations I have seen or heard about, you either have waves of incoming threats or they are coming one after another. In our scenario, you have 50 threats converging on your position at almost the same time.”

The methods to detect, track and identify threats differed by vendor, as did defeat mechanisms, which included machine guns and rockets, high-powered microwave and electronic warfare systems. Some vendors provided kinetic interceptor drone-on-drone defeats, or combined aspects of other mechanisms.

“Some systems have small arms as part of their hard kill, but also have electronic warfare capabilities they can use,” said Silen. “There is no one silver bullet in defending against threat UAS, especially when they are swarms. You have to have a layered defense to be able to fend off all the threats we are giving the systems.”

The testers watched for any anomalies and took extensive notes on each of the individual systems. The most recent demonstrations also attracted observers from counter-UAS programs who were hoping to gain insights that might be useful to other aspects of advancing technology to defend against the sUAS threat.

“There is definitely a lot of push to support our allies and be sure we are coming up with good systems,” said Silen. “In addition to the nine vendors participating in the counter swarm demonstration, there are also seven U.S. government-sponsored systems observing and collecting data.”

YPG’s clear, stable air and extremely dry climate, along with vast institutional UAS testing knowledge, makes it an attractive location to testers, as does the ability to control a large swath of the radio frequency spectrum. YPG has more than 500 permanent radio frequencies, and several thousand temporary ones in a given month.

“There are other places where this is possible, but from my perspective it would be a harder lift on my end to coordinate with new people who haven’t dealt with the speed and agility of JCO demonstrations before,” said Silen. “The test is so complex because every week has new vendors coming in, so every week is essentially a new test. With the help of the test officers at YPG, we can safely execute it and have a plan to collect the data. The support is always top notch.”

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