The New Drone Terror War Dynamic

Terror Groups Are Strapping Bombs to Cheap Consumer Drones

Motherboard: Most discussions involving the use of remotely piloted aircraft in combat likely conjure up images of America’s giant Predator and Reaper drones, tailor-made military aircraft designed for surveillance and killing. But videos posted recently to YouTube coupled with US military reports suggest that combatants and civilians alike in war-torn regions might also need to worry about weaponized versions of small, inexpensive consumer drones.

In Syria, a country ravaged by civil war, militant groups have started jury rigging quadcopter-style drones with makeshift bombs to drop on targets, military officials told the Associated Press. These small-fry drones would have once been dismissed as unnerving, but harmless. However, a video posted last month showing a drone purportedly belonging to Jund al-Aqsa (a fragment of al-Qaeda) dropping bombs on Syrian armed forces in the Hama province of Syria indicates this may not be the case for much longer.

Another video, this one of alleged footage filmed from a Hezbollah-flown drone, shows bombs being dropped on targets near Aleppo, in Syria.

The Islamic State is also reportedly directly involved in the rudimentary weaponization of consumer drones. A US military official told The New York Times this week that a drone “the size of a model airplane” exploded after being shot down in Iraq recently. The explosion killed two Kurdish fighters, and the official described how the drone contained an explosive device “disguised as a battery.” The small drone, which was thought to be just like many others Islamic State forces use for reconnaissance, exploded after the fighters took it back to their outpost for inspection.

The incident is believed to be the first time Islamic State has successfully killed with a drone deployed with explosives, and the Times reports that American commanders in Iraq are warning allied forces to be wary of any small flying aircraft moving forward.

Jack Serle, a journalist with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Covert Drone War project, told Motherboard that while these drones do not pose the same threat as conventional weapons launched from military aircraft or so-called hunter-killer drones like Reapers and Predators, their capacity to induce panic in civilian areas is a problem.

“What’s really been making people nervous about shop-bought drones in the hands of non-state groups is use in civilian areas, especially in crowded places like shopping centers or sports stadiums,” Serle wrote in an email. “They may not inflict mass casualties, but the terror and panic they could cause is really worrying. This potential for this kind of thing has been on many people’s minds for some years now, and the technology is starting to become a reality.”

A video posted to YouTube showing what is claimed to be a Hezbollah armed drone in Syria. It is worth noting that the authenticity of these videos is still unclear.

American troops stationed in Iraq and Syria have also commented on the rise of small consumeTrr drones being spotted in the air, according to the Times. Such sightings go hand-in-hand with new tactics from the Islamic State.

“In August, the Islamic State called on its followers to jury-rig small store-bought drones with grenades or other explosives and use them to launch attacks at the Olympics,” the Times reported. While no such attacks ever took place in Brazil, the message from Islamic State highlights the terrorist organization’s apparent willingness to expand its toolkit.

Serle told Motherboard that the problem may also be growing as a result of the falling cost of consumer drones that are simultaneously becoming more sophisticated. While traditional anti-air and newly-designed anti-drone weapons exist, Serle said that as consumer drones get more advanced, and the pilots operating them become more adept, “you can imagine a big swarm of them being very hard to stop.”

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BreakingDefense: The US Navy needs to get better at hunting sea mines. The Royal Navy needs to get better at robots. So the two fleets are joining forces off Scotland in what the Brits are calling “the largest demonstration of its type, ever,” Unmanned Warrior 2016, with “more than 50 unmanned vehicles from over 40 organizations.” The US Office of Naval Research is a major partner in Unmanned Warrior, contributing ten different technologies for testing, from mini-subs to laser drones.

A major (albeit not exclusive) focus for the exercise is mine warfare. As Breaking D readers know, the US Navy has long neglected the unglamorous and grueling work of minesweeping, relying heavily on allies like the UK. Today the U.S. has just 13 operational minesweepers (the Avenger class), for example, while relatively tiny Britain has 15 (seven Sanddowns and eight Hunts). But the US got a loud wakeup call in 2012, when Iran started threatening to mine the Strait of Hormuz. The US Navy responded by hurriedly mobilizing experimental minesweeping systems, many of them robotic (and many originally slated for the troubled Littoral Combat Ship). While robots remain too inflexible for fast-paced combat, they’re ideal for missions that are “dull, dirty, and dangerous,” and mine clearing can be all three.

The 10 systems the Office of Naval Research sent to Unmanned Warrior include seven directly related to mine warfare:

• Mine warfare platoons, the current gold standard in Navy mine warfare, operate Mark 18 unmanned mini-subs off rigid-hulled inflatable boats.
• Rapid Environmental Assessment sends unmanned underwater vehicles to survey the sea floor and underwater environment, creating the kind of detailed picture particularly useful to mine hunters.
• Slocum Gliders are long-range underwater drones that can spend months mapping the underwater world.
• Seahunter is a small unmanned aircraft carrying a lightweight laser sensor (LIDAR) to map shallow waters where traditional sonar struggles.
• MCM C2 (Mine Counter-Measures Command & Control) combines multiple robotic systems: Unmanned mini-subs transmit data back to an unmanned mini-helicopter, which in turn relays reports to and orders from a manned ship at a safe distance. An unmanned boat acts as the mini-copter’s floating base.
• The ongoing Hell Bay trials continue in Unmanned Warrior, this time focusing on coordinated operations among allied drones — including a kind of underwater traffic control —  and by multiple unmanned vehicles acting as an autonomous unit.

There’s also a network of fixed and drone-mounted cameras for port security, ship-recognition software for unmanned reconnaissance systems, and a lightweight recon drone.

Unmanned Warrior, which is happening for the first time this year, is part of the much larger and long-established Joint Warrior exercise involving all three UK services and their NATO allies. As Russia becomes more bellicose, such large-scale wargames are increasingly important, both as practical preparation for the worst case and deterrent signaling to prevent it.