Counter-drone at platoon level: an engineering problem, not a procurement one

Ukraine has settled the question of whether small drones threaten every soldier or only concern specialists, and in this regard, the doctrine has caught up. US Army ATP 3-01.81 makes countering small drones the responsibility of every soldier and unit, and allied practice is converging on the same principle. What has not caught up however, is what we can put in a soldier’s hands. Handheld jammers in service today weigh between two and seven kilograms, on top of 50kgs carried by an infantry soldier from weapons, plates, ammunition, water and radio. They last under an hour in full use, so the effector stays switched off until a drone appears, which may be too late. They cover the common control and satellite-navigation bands but miss the Wi-Fi and mobile links many civilian-derived drones use, and more often than not, they need two hands and a trained operator. So sections within the infantry nominate one counter-uncrewed aerial system (C-UAS) specialist, and that single decision re-concentrates a formation the drone threat had forced to disperse. A section strung across two hundred metres cannot rely on one person’s line of sight. This is a significant gap in our C-UAS capability that must be closed. Why a decade of investment has not closed the gap Take “every soldier” seriously and the specification for C-UAS becomes obvious: under a kilogram, the limit for anything carried on top of a full combat load; broad frequency coverage, because the threat uses military and civilian links; effect beyond a kilometre, so it has time to work before the drone is overhead; and several hours of operation, because protection has to last for the duration of the risk. Most of all, it must be one-handed or mountable on a rifle, and require no specialist training, because a device that needs a specialist does not scale. Every one of those figures has already been met on its own. Sub-kilogram, wideband, and long-running handhelds all exist. What does not exist is all of them in one device at a price that scales. The limitation comes from how C-UAS effector building blocks – the antennas, power amplifiers, power and battery management module and signal-generation –  interact electronically, how they are integrated mechanically and how effectively heat is dissipated without the need for bulky heatsinks. Even something as simple as a cable and connectors connecting the power amplifier to the antenna can result in loss of half the power available to disrupt drone communications. Losses such as these require even higher power amplifiers, which in turn require even more heatsinking. Power amplifier efficiency determines the heat dissipation, which in turn sets the performance, reliability and lifetime of the overall C-UAS effector. When integrating from commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) components, these effects and limitations become the norm, leaving system integrators limited degrees of freedom when addressing these. As a result, every percentage point lost in converting battery power to radiated power translates into runtime that is not available to the soldier when it is most needed. This does not mean that C-UAS efforts designed by integrating COTS components do not work. But they limit the extent you can pursue weight, form-factor reduction and the overall cost. At platform scale, vertical integration from custom designed chips, antennas, battery power management and signal-generation is where the value is created and is what enables performance within a tightly integrated sub-1Kg, small form-factor. Cost behaves the same way, because COTS bill of materials prices in each supplier’s margin as well as the volumes. Vertical integration based on design of chips, antennas and the rest of the system together is what makes the envelope and the price possible. The question this raises for Australia Solving the challenges of hand-held effector deployment at individual solder-level still does not solve the threat of drones. A jammer in every soldier’s hand is necessary and it alone is not sufficient. Swarms overwhelm a single operator, onboard autonomy shortens the window in which breaking the control link matters, and fibre-tethered drones sit outside what radio-frequency attack can reach at all. Those are limits on the technique rather than on any one product, and they are why Australia needs sensing, electronic attack and kinetic effects working together. What the dismounted layer contributes is the part none of the others can, because it is the only one that scales to every soldier and moves with a formation as it disperses. It is also why the threat keeps moving, and that should shape where we should spend. The 2026 Integrated Investment Program commits up to $7 billion to counter-drone capability. If we judge a C-UAS supplier on how its device performs on the day it is assessed, we will end up fielding something well-matched to last year’s threat, because drone warfare and the corresponding countermeasures change every two weeks, as evidenced in Ukraine. Two questions should be addressed in every evaluation, and they should apply to every C-UAS supplier whatever the device size: where does design authority sit for the parts that set performance, and how fast can that supplier change them? A supplier who can redesign the chip, the firmware and the system stays inside the threat’s cycle, while one waiting on a vendor’s component cannot. We should buy on the assumption of rapid iteration to keep with the everchanging drone threat and the supplier’s ability to iterate in short-time scales, rather than on a single selection. Dr Venkata Gutta is founder and chief executive of MILLIBEAM, which designs radio-frequency technology in Australia from the semiconductor chip to the fielded system. He is based in Sydney.