Jan Osburg, Timothy Parker, Hunter Stoll, Scott Boston & Terrence K. Kelly
Small Uncrewed Aircraft Systems in Divisional Brigades: Electronic Warfare and Spectrum Management Considerations
Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) are changing how wars are fought. Over the course of the past decade, advancements in autonomous control, battery technology, sensors, and other relevant technologies have led to a rapid increase in the capabilities—and a reduction in the cost—of UAS (Wilson et al., 2020; Pernin et al., 2021). This has been particularly pronounced for small UAS (SUAS), defined as those with a maximum take-off gross weight of under 55 lbs / 25 kg (U.S. Code, Title 14, Part 107), and this trend is expected to continue (Herrera, Dechant, and Green, 2017). The increase in capabilities has resulted in a corresponding increase of more than an order of magnitude in the number of civilian SUAS in operation over the past several years (Pilot Institute, 2021), with use cases now ranging from “drone racing” to cinematography to crop-dusting to purely recreational flying.1 In turn, market demand has further accelerated the increase in capabilities and decrease in cost, particularly for SUAS designed for the civilian market.
Until recently, military use of SUAS was rare. It took the fight against the “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” (ISIS) terrorist group in Syria, the Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020, and finally the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2022 to conclusively demonstrate the opportunities—and threats—posed by these new capabilities (Red Six, 2019; CA INT REGT, 2021; Reed and Rife, 2022; Bellini, 2022). Now the Department of Defense (DoD) is launching a major effort to leverage related technologies (Newdick and Rogoway, 2023).
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