On Thursday, during a hearing at the House Armed Service Committee, Marine leaders told lawmakers that they were also looking at drones that can kill other drones to bolster the Corps’ air defense capabilities.
Lt. Gen. Steven R. Rudder, the deputy commandant of the Marine Corps for aviation, told lawmakers that the miniaturization of tech was helping provide capabilities like “precision-guided munitions that can be launched and hover and loiter at great distances,” to “small UASs [unmanned aircraft system] that can counter other UASs, that we can certainly launch from a manportable system.”
Whether that system will employ kinetic or electronic attack to take down enemy drones was not clear during Thursday’s hearing, but the Corps has been experimenting with a range of loitering drone munitions capable of carrying different payloads.
The threat of swarming drones has become an ever-growing threat, which Rudder characterized Thursday as a “great concern,” especially as even small terror and militia groups have managed to weaponize small commercial drones.
For one thing, ground-based air defense is just one more thing that infantry have to lug around if they want to be protected. The weight issue is bad enough without forcing forward units on foot to be responsible for the defense of their local "brown sky" air space.
This is why I argued in Army magazine for Army air defense drones to battle enemy drone swarms.
