21 December 2018 (Paris, France) — And so we end the year as we began it: drone attacks. Well, at least my year because the first conference I attended in January 2018 was at the Pentagon and it was about drone warfare. I will get to that in a moment.
We still know very little about the drones that have shut down Gatwick, the U.K.’s second busiest airport, but their example is a painful reminder of our transportation system’s vulnerabilities. And we are left with a sobering thought: if they can’t defend a single runway airport from this, what can they defend from a drone attack?
I had a brief chat this morning with one of my cyber security contacts who is involved in analyzing the Gatwick attack (and it is an attack) and he said:
-Gatwick is uniquely susceptible since it’s a small, single-runway airport (not small in impact but in area)
-there were a pair of drones initially spotted flying over the runway, but now more have been tracked, grounding flights
-as he said (as have others quoted in the press) there is no doubt these drone “intrusions” were highly targeted and designed to cause maximum disruption just before Christmas
-and it has given the law enforcement agencies all the ammunition they need to say drones are a safety and national security threat and must be banned.
The commentators who say “this hasn’t happened anywhere in the world before” are only partly right. In the West, maybe. But last January Russia responded to an attack by a swarm of drones targeting a Russian airbase in north-western Syria and a naval station on the Mediterranean Sea. The multi-drone attack, which is suspected to have been launched by militants, was believed to be the first of its kind, representing a new threat from terrorist groups, although a Pentagon source told me there have been at least two others in the Middle East.
The use of a swarm attack demonstrates a militant capability, which was previously limited to states, to simultaneously control and coordinate several commercial drones at one time using a GPS unit. This development may send viewers of the science-fiction series Black Mirror into hiding, but it should prompt professional militaries to double down on countermeasures, specifically the creation of electronic jamming tech.
On the technical side the power to hack or even shoot down drones is there but advances in drone technology make it more difficult for law enforcement (in the Gatwick situation) to identify communication signals between drones and ground operators. The bad guys are always one step ahead. Drone makers do support remote identification standards so officials can spot drones operated by potential hostile actors. But it is not so easy.
Note: next month my first post out of the box is my annual “52 Little (and Big) Things I Learned About Technology” with a look back at 2018 and I have an entire section devoted to drone technology.
Drones can be innocuous. But they can also be outfitted with bombs. And worse, as I will discuss next month, the military is already examining “assassin drones” that can be outfitted with facial recognition technology to track and kill targets.
This is way beyond the August attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro when two drones, each equipped with a kilogram of powerful plastic explosives, failed to reach him and crashed into the crowd. But it ushered in a foreboding new era – terrorism by unmanned aircraft.
Again, just as we have seen how dangerously uninformed and naive we are about Vladimir Putin’s deliberate strategy to disrupt democracy and create chaos in the West (using the West’s very own social media technology to do it) we are equally blind and naive to the force and horror of technology. Forget recreational drones and package delivery: there is a war on.
What’s really happening out there
At the January Pentagon event I referenced above, I heard stories of of drones operated by rebels and militants in Yemen, and over the skies of Syria and Iraq. The Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and Hamas, the Palestinian group that operates in the Gaza Strip, are the only groups with military drones in their arsenal, which were supplied by Iran, but terrorist use of unmanned aircraft has grown in recent history with the popularity of commercial drones. In January 2017, Islamic State documents were recovered by a Harvard researcher embedded with Iraqi troops that revealed details about the terror network’s drone program, which is equipped with commercially available drone models reconfigured to carry small bombs and munitions, and directed by trained drone pilots. An incident in October 2016, months before the revelations about Isis’s drone program, confirmed the lethality of these rigged machines. A drone shot down and recovered in northern Iraq by Kurdish forces exploded on being dismantled, killing two soldiers.
A Pentagon source said these drones are being bought off the Amazon web site and other online sites. Commercial drones are popular among terror networks because of their availability and generally low costs. And even if they’re not successfully weaponised, small, remote-controlled drones have the potential to disrupt military operations in a variety of nonviolent ways. They can be used to surveil military targets in support of a conventional terrorist attack, to carry hazardous materials to a target location, or to take propaganda videos of their operations.
Note: the U.S. military … and Chinese military … are also on board. Last year the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that the government research organisation was soliciting proposals for its OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics (OFFSET) programme, designed to “test swarms of air and ground robots in urban environments for military attack”. Earlier this year the Chinese military deployed more than 1,000 quadcopters, the largest recorded drone swarm, in a demonstration at the Fortune Global Forum hosted in Guangzhou.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
I must get back to packing my car for our Xmas/New Years trip out to Saint-Malo so just a few quick points:
-Drones snapping pictures or recording video has become so common that it will be nearly impossible to discern if a drone is being used to conduct surveillance of potential targets or sensitive sites that terrorists are plotting to attack. The attempt on Maduro came close, and the attention it has received in the media could embolden other similar attempts.
-Terrorists are highly adaptive and innovative and will continue to find new ways to spread fear and chaos. It is imperative that counterterrorism specialists begin planning a robust response to the threat, not only in terms of detection and counter-measure technology, but also the training necessary to defend against attacks by weaponized drones.
-Airports, stadiums, borders, oil and gas refineries have spent a lot of money on ground security, but not airspace security. There are some very sophisticated radar systems being developed to detect intruder drones, and then send a drone hunter to pluck them out of the sky or dogfight with them if necessary. One system will be tested next year in the U.S. at the Super Bowl.
-Not discussed in this post are the “other” drones, the U.S. drone program that carries out extrajudicial and extraterritorial killings. I will save that discussion for next year.
The biggest issue: commercially available drones will become cheaper, more sophisticated, and capable of carrying larger payloads. And terror groups will continue to capitalize on this technology, using drones to disrupt military operations and attempt to harm civilian populations. It’s a technological problem that requires a technological solution.