OIF Veterans Author a new book called DAMN FINE SOLDIERS By Kris Osborn, Warrior (Washington DC) Lasers, guided rockets, guns firing proximity rounds, electronic warfare and even high-powered microwave are merely a few of the countermeasures increasingly able to destroy drones, a fast-growing Pentagon emphasis as weapons developers follow Ukraine and “sprint” to stay in front of an evolving drone threat. Many of the most recent defenses leverage AI and "on-the-move" kinds of defenses. The Pentagon has launched a special Counter-Drone Task Force and industry is revving up efforts to anticipate military requirements, close capability gaps and “offer” solutions ready to integrate into current government and emerging fire control systems and command and control networks. C-UAS University As the executive lead of a joint C-UAS task force, the Army operates a special C-UAS University at Fort Sill, Okla. The University is multifaceted in that it incorporates conceptual, strategic, tactical and operational variables … and the intersections between them … are areas of focused analysis. The scholars at C-UAS focus on new technologies employed in current wars such as Ukraine with a mind to better understanding modern threats and emerging concepts of operation. “The threat is evolving so quickly. It's, you know, what we always say is what we learn today will be irrelevant tomorrow…. and that's kind of the way it is. Electronic warfare, high powered microwave and directed energy lasers are all capabilities that are being developed and obviously all at different stages of development,” Lt. Col. John Peterson, Director, Joint Counter UAS University, told Warrior in an interview. “We do primarily use both non kinetic and kinetic capabilities, and that's what we train here, EW is, you know, a capability that we focus on with the systems that we train on here at the schoolhouse along with some handheld kinetic weapons. We also train through simulation.” Many of the Pentagon’s industry partners are innovating new generations of counter drone technologies increasingly able to defend against swarms, guided drones and those hardened against EW interference or able to operate in a GPS “denied” environment. Honeywell SAMURAI Industry partners are working to embrace the Pentagon’s “layered” defense strategy in which specific threat scenarios are met with a wide range of “effectors” or countermeasures able to destroy incoming attack drones. One such innovation now being offered to the military services is Honeywell’s SAMURAI, called Stationary and Mobile UAS Reveal and Intercept. The idea is to operate an on-the-move system capable of integrating a wide range of sensors and effectors to track and destroy drones. Honeywell's SAMURAI is one of many industry offerings seeking to anticipate Army requirements and needs in the counter-drone fight. “One of the military operators out there asked us a couple of years ago to help them create a system that does counter-UAS on the move. They wanted us to be able to go 70 miles an hour down the road and protect the assets that they were moving from point A to point B. So we've used some of their funding as well as some of our internal funding to develop the newest on-the-move counter-UAS capability,” Tom Konicki, Vice President, Business Development, Honeywell, told Warrior in an interview at the 2025 Air & Space Force Association Annual Symposium. Point to point kinetic drone defense systems have existed for many years, yet more recent breakthroughs now enable high-speed on-the-move kinetic and non-kinetic drone defenses networked together in an integrated computer processing and fire control system. “We are using a sensor fusion module to bring all of the detectors and effectors in. So at the end of the day, I don't care which detector or effector that I'm using.I want to be able to ingest all the detail from different sensors and normalize the information so it's displayed for the operator,” Konicki said. The concept is to use interfaces engineered with common IP protocol to ensure the technical infrastructure and “1s” and “0s” can integrate otherwise incompatible pools of incoming sensor data and targeting detail. SAMURAI is configured to operate and connect with a wide range of sensors to include Gatling Guns, laser-guided rockets, anti-drone ground-fired interceptor missiles, small arms, crew-served weapons and even EW able to capture the RF protocol of an approaching drone signal and “take it over.” I “What we employ are some electronic warfare techniques that are just going to jam in all directions in a particular range, and then that could send the drone into a lost communications mode where maybe it hovers, maybe it goes back home. We also have cyber takeover capabilities. As the drone gets closer to us and further away from its operator, we can take control of it. We can tell it where to go, where to land,” Konicki said At the same time, drone defense is evolving beyond these advanced methods to even counter attacking unmanned systems called “dark drones,” which can operate without using GPS or RF. In some cases in Ukraine, fiber-optic cable is being used to avoid “jamming” and there are other guidance technologies increasingly able to operate without needing GPS or even an RF signature, particularly if it is tethered in some fashion. “Other drones that are getting more sophisticated are not using GPS and are not using RF, So what do you do with those? Those are the dark drones, right? We can still use the radars. We still use our camera, but we're also using other technologies like acoustics to listen to the propellers and see what type of drone it is just based on that,” Konicki said. Various indicators or incoming sensor data is fed into a software-enabled fire control system which can then help human decision makers discern and distinguish which “effector” or countermeasure is optimal for a given threat circumstance. In the future, Honeywell weapons developers plan to integrate acoustic sensing from its now-deployed base-defense system called Vindicator. All of this is increasingly enabled by AI-empowered systems able to aggregate, gather and "bounce" incoming sensor data off of a database to make determinations, verify threats and essentially recommend countermeasure options to human decision makers. Using advanced algorithms and unprecedented processing speed, AI-enabled systems can massively shorten the "sensor-to-shooter" curve and help identify and destroy attacking drones in seconds or milliseconds as opposed to minutes. Golden Dome & C-UAS Integration While SAMURAI is primarily oriented toward high-speed, multi-effector on-the-move drone defense, its engineers are aware of the emerging technological synergies likely to connect closer-in drone defensive with the kinds of upper echelon longer-range drone and missile intercept defenses being evaluated for the Pentagon’s emerging Golden Dome. “I think there's a natural convergence happening between what we're doing with counter-UAS and Golden Dome. A lot of the technologies are going to be similar. I think you are going to see an eventual convergence where one feeds into the other system. We've been in talks with Israel, for example. They have some fantastic capabilities that they're currently using with Iron Dome,” Konicki said.
