Top military threat for US: Attacks by drones

Pentagon asks for $500M to provide extra defenses

WASHINGTON – Drone attacks have become the No. 1 threat to U.S. troops abroad, prompting a $500 million urgent request to help erect defenses.

Cheap, easy to use and hard to defend against, drones toting explosives pose risks to troops akin to the improvised explosive devices that killed and wounded thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to senior military and U.S. officials and experts. It was a one-way attack drone launched by Iranian-backed militants that killed three U.S. soldiers in January after slipping past defenses at their base in Jordan.

“This is a new weapon system,” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview. “It’s cheap. It can be sophisticated in terms of its electronics to identify targets itself, remotely, and then attack. This is a new phase of warfare, and we have to get ready, and we are.”

Military officials described an intense effort to protect troops from drones with missiles, microwave radiation and lasers. The Pentagon is receiving more than $500 million through a supplemental request to Congress to address the drone threat. President Joe Biden signed it into law April 24 as part of the $95 billion foreign aid package.

Rapid changes in technology and tactics require the Pentagon to move quickly, said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution. He favors a pool of funds to promote innovative and cheap defenses that jam signals used to guide drones as well as killer drones to hunt down the enemy’s.

The drone dilemma

Not long ago, the Pentagon dominated the sky over battlefields with drones like the Predator and Reaper. Pilots operating drones in an outpost in the Nevada desert launched Hellfire missiles on suspected militants in Afghanistan and Iraq. Troops on patrols in combat zones hurled small drones in the air to spy on movements of adversaries nearby. Look at the war in Ukraine through the lens of social media platform X, and you’ll see myriad examples of drones hovering over Russian tanks and dropping high explosives into an open hatch. Or a video feed from one-way attack drones, many supplied by the Pentagon, hurtling after an armored vehicle and detonating on impact.

However, the Pentagon’s days as the lone drone superpower are long over, said a senior defense official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. Gone, too, is the possibility of stopping the proliferation of the technology that makes drones smaller, lighter, stealthier, more powerful and more deadly, the official said. Commercial drones and parts for them are readily available.

The reality plays out from the Red Sea, where Iranian-backed Houthi militants fire drones at busy shipping lanes, to Iran, which launched a wave of drones and missiles at Israel April 13. In both cases, virtually all of the drones were destroyed before hitting their targets. But it takes an array of defenses and considerable expense to do so.