Closing the gaps on unmanned threats
| Countering rogue drones, without breaking the law or the bank

Malicious drone activity, increasingly common globally, emerged in India this summer with a sudden and hitherto unseen spurt in intrusions by unidentified drones over high-security sites within controlled perimeters, often outlining airspace over sensitive military bases located in border areas. With few options for counter-measures that could address these threats efficiently and economically, security forces have resorted to firing their weapons at these drones, on the occasions they could get a visual fix on the intruders — almost the equivalent of shaking a fist at the sky, until the threat sauntered away and diminished, or in some few cases, fell after being shot down, running out of juice or losing its signal.

Indian Experience

While many instances of drones smuggling weapons and drugs across India’s borders have been reported in recent months, the most serious incident took place on June 27th when two drones dropped Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) inside an Indian Air Force (IAF) base in Jammu, injuring two personnel.

Administrators of some districts in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab and Rajasthan states, imposed a complete ban on the flying of drones by anyone, in some cases requiring operators to deposit their kit with the authorities, seemingly on the premise that bad actors would find themselves compelled by these directives or that their flying activities would somehow become more vulnerable to action by security forces, even in the continued absence of any new counter-measures.

Global Problem

Many other recent instances have demonstrated the wide spectrum of mischief that malicious drone activity can undertake. Last year, a drone was used in a failed attack on an electrical substation in Pennsylvania in the U.S., by simply trailing a length of copper wire over electrical equipment to cause a short circuit and presumably, a further massive failure. And last month, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi survived an attack from a drone carrying explosives on his residence, which resulted in injuries to six personnel. In 2018, a similar attack had been carried out on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at a parade, resulting in injuries to at least seven personnel. The same year, malicious or nuisance operators grounded thousands of flights from Gatwick Airport in London after their drones shut down operations for several days. And drones were also used in an attack on a Saudi oil processing facility in 2019.

Although new regulations have come into force to licence and regulate drone operations in India, solutions are still required to threats posed by bad actors who could hardly be presumed to consider themselves bound by such rules.

Critical infrastructure, mass events, security-sensitive sites, military bases, national borders and important personalities are now all vulnerable to intrusion, surveillance and attack from inexpensive, easy to source, configure and program, and reliable, unmanned systems operated by bad actors.

Current Solutions to an Evolving Problem

While some technology solutions have been put together to counter malicious drone activity, because of the ease of availability and low expenditure associated with drone technologies and controlling systems, the tactics of bad actors operating drones have also evolved.

With drone and allied technology developing rapidly, larger payloads, greater ranges and endurance because of larger and more efficient battery capacities will present greater risks at decreasing costs.

One company has come up with innovative and comprehensive solutions to deal with these evolving threats. Speaking to StratPost at the Dubai Air Show 2021 last month, Timothy Bean, CEO and Founder of U.S. company Fortem Technologies, explained the specific challenge this involves.

Bean says the first problem is to devise a robust detection method for unidentified drones without missing any, due to reliance on visual detection or gaps and blindspots in security surveillance. The second problem, he explained, are options for something security forces can do about aerial intruders. And doing it without breaking the bank by deploying eye-wateringly expensive air-defence systems, is the third problem.

Common solutions to drones have included RF (Radio Frequency) detection and jamming, in addition to laser counter-measures, besides the use of firearms or air-defence systems to shoot down malicious drones. These solutions can be inefficient, expensive and difficult to deploy in all conditions.

According to Bean, most popular anti-drone systems on the market rely on directional jamming, something that often relies on visual detection, if not radars, and then jamming of a controlling signal.

Problem is, the bad guys have changed tactics and malicious drone operators are increasingly moving from controlling drone operations in real-time, to programming drones to carry out their missions, autonomously. The result is there is simply no RF signal to jam, spoof or commandeer. This can leave multiple potential points of failure.

Bean described the drone threat scenario, “We partner with a lot of large U.S. defence primes. They shoot missiles or lasers and that’s great for the battlefield but we’re a different layer, here. We also partner with large companies that do RF detection. Three or four years ago, if you wanted to protect your site or your base against a drone, you’d buy an RF antenna and you would listen for the drone. And you’d listen for the joystick talking to the drone, and the drone would be emitting an RF signal to be controlled. And if you heard that signal, then you’d have a ‘red button’ to press to jam the signal or hack the signal, to take control over the drone. The challenge now is that these drones — these hostile drones are flying autonomously. There’s no one with a joystick. So when they buy these drones from Alibaba or Amazon — you don’t have a signal to hack or to jam. They just program these drones on an iPad to go from A to B to C to D. And so it flies right over the antenna, completely undetected and when you press the ‘red button’ there’s nothing to jam,” he explained.

Another problem with the existing approach is not all security forces, government or private, might be legally authorised in all jurisdictions, to operate counter-measures like RF jamming because of potential interference with essential RF channels, or lasers, for that matter, which can require large amounts of power to be potent at range, and are not always effective in all kinds of atmospheric and weather conditions, or capable of being deployed at all sites and geographies. For example, high levels of humidity in the air can have a deleterious effect on the integrity of a laser beam.

Bean also pointed out the uncertain wisdom in deploying kinetic counter-measures like missiles or Directed Energy Weapons such as lasers at sites like military bases or nuclear power plants.

Fortem SkyDome

The concept of Fortem’s anti-drone counter-measures technology is based on distributed radar, said Bean, which is akin to cellular phone coverage. With multiple units of small distributed radar mounted at heights lower than traditional radars, to provide overlapping coverage over a discrete site or venue, gaps and blindspots in coverage, normally present in the case of single-unit large radar, are removed without any requirement for visual or RF detection.

“We don’t rely on the enemy emitting anything to be able to detect it. We do it through distributed radar. So instead of buying one of these huge radars in the back of a truck — something that weighs 50 pounds on a tripod — you put a dozen around a stadium, 30 around the campus or thousands throughout the city, and you start to understand everything that’s in the airspace. Traditional radar will look out like a Batman beam. And while they’ll see something a long way away, it’ll be with a very narrow field of view, and they won’t see the drone when it gets closer. And you’ve heard the saying ‘flying below the radar’? Those radars are typically pointed pretty high. Our radar is mounted very low. So we’re seeing things relatively low to the ground that are multiple, small-sized objects. Those big radars filter out those small objects,” said Bean.

According to him, Fortem Technologies’ SkyDome System has a ‘120×120 field of view’ and stares ‘a mile into the sky’. “When a drone’s flying over an airport, an army base, a concert hall or an oilfield, we know where it is at all times because we fill the whole space by distributing radar coverage. Instead of one large radar, we deploy distributed radar,” said Bean.

Fortem Technologies’ SkyDome System consists of the TrueView AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radar weighing 1.3 kilograms or 7 kilograms depending on the model, of which multiple units can be deployed, depending on the area to be covered, the SkyDome Manager Software, which uses Artificial Intelligence to discriminate between threats, running on the Edge Management System, the computing, communications and power distribution hardware, and finally, the DroneHunter, which captures intruding drones.

The 1.3-kilogram model TrueView radar can detect small drones 800 metres away, while the 7-kilogram radar can spot them at a distance of 1.8 kilometres, operating in temperatures between -40°C to 55°C.

Not a Bird, Not a Plane, It’s a Drone

Bean explained how the system discriminates between birds and drones by distinguishing and determining discrete patterns of motion. “If I’m walking, my movement is the ‘Doppler’, my hands going back and forth, as I walk, is the ‘Micro-Doppler’. So a bird flapping its wings is the Micro-Doppler. A drone moving? The radar sees the movement as the Doppler and the spinning blades would be the Micro-Doppler. So those have different signatures in the radar and we do all that processing at the Edge Management System, which is very unique in such a very small radar. So we can tell bird versus drone here at the Edge,” he said.

And the rest of the system comes in. “So all that data goes back to our central SkyDome Manager Software where we assess it. We create these volumetric exclusion zones that are 3D in space, and we determine if anything ever hits in this software, since the distributed radar is so accurate. And because the radar is so accurate, it’s like within a metre. An RF system that’s listening for drones might be accurate to between fifty to a hundred feet. We’re accurate as soon as the drone crosses the fence-line because the radar is very accurate in 3D. As soon as it does and it’s a drone, we can assess if it’s a threat. Then the whole rules engine kicks off to cue a camera, sound an alarm or a warning. Or launch the Fortem DroneHunter,” he prescribed.

Watch how the DroneHunter works in the video above

The DroneHunter, said Bean, is ‘a completely autonomous flying drone’. The radar-guided drone is launched out of a hangar and directed by the ground system to the target drone to capture it with a net.

Low Risk Intelligence Gathering

According to Bean, the SkyDome System is effective in high-altitude regions. He also thinks it might be more suitable for use than other systems deploying kinetic counter-measures like missiles or lasers, especially at national borders, with the costs and risks involved. “We like to blow things up, but if you’re smart, just capture it,” he said, pointing out the intelligence value of such an approach. Rules of engagement in some circumstances, too, might constrain security forces from deploying such kinetic measures.

Market & Investor Confidence

Fortem Technologies has come a long way in a very short period. “We have 90 customers on five continents,” said Bean. Fortem Technologies began with DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “Three years ago, Boeing looked at us and they sent 50 people over eight months to do due diligence, and chose and invested in Fortem. Then Mubadala, the sovereign fund of the UAE, invested a year later. And then just last year, Toshiba invested in the company,” he listed, summarizing, “So I’ll just say that Boeing validated our technology, Mubadala validated that it’s a real problem — drones, blowing things up. And Toshiba validated our market.”