Affordable enough to fire, fast enough to evolve

OPINION:

A drone assembled from commercial parts crosses the line, and a six-figure missile leaves the rail to meet it. The missile works. The drone is destroyed, but the defender has just spent many times what the attacker did. Next month the adversary changes the drone: a new airframe, a different control link, a flight profile the last engagement never saw. The missile is still the same missile, and it will be the same one next year. Cost is half of the counter-drone problem. The speed of change is the other half, and Washington has spent far more time on the first than the second.

The cost problem

The arithmetic of today’s counter-UAS posture favors the side that is shooting cheaply. An attacker can field drones by the hundred for the price of a single exquisite interceptor. A defender who answers each one with a high-end missile will run out of interceptors long before the attacker runs out of drones, and will run out of money shortly after that. Magazine depth is a budget question as much as an engineering one. Every service member who has stood watch over a base or a convoy knows the feeling of counting what is left, and every appropriator knows what it costs to refill the rack. When the defender must ration shots against targets that cost almost nothing, the attacker is already winning the exchange whether or not any individual drone gets through.

The adaptation problem

The second problem is harder to see on a spreadsheet. Small drones are software and commodity hardware, so they change at the pace of the commercial electronics market. Operators swap airframes, add jamming resistance, fly in groups and try new tactics the moment an old one stops working. A weapon program built around a multi-year development cycle meets that threat on the wrong clock. By the time a traditional system reaches the field, the target it was designed against has been replaced, sometimes more than once. The soldier gets a capability that was right for the last fight, and the taxpayer has paid for it anyway.

The model that works

The answer is an interceptor that is cheap enough to fire in volume, and cheap enough to keep improving. Four habits make that possible:

Test in the field, not just the lab. A design that performs on a range under controlled conditions tells you very little about a crowded, jammed and unpredictable sky. Constant live demonstrations and live-fire shoot-offs with the services, against realistic targets, show where a system fails while there is still time to fix it.

Iterate fast. Each test should produce lessons, and those lessons should become upgrades in weeks. Treating interceptors as software-driven products with generations, much like a phone or a car, lets the design keep pace with the threat. Powerus has put multiple generations of its interceptor through this cycle in its first years.

Build at home, and at volume. Upgrades only help if they reach the field quickly. Domestic production gives engineers a short path from a test result to a line change to a unit receiving the improved version, and it keeps the supply chain under American control. Production at home also means the same line can scale when demand rises, without waiting on a foreign supplier.

Keep a human in the loop. Autonomy handles the work that people are too slow to do, such as tracking a small target and guiding the interceptor to it. Operators keep authority over when and whether to engage. That balance is what lets commanders trust the system and lets Congress oversee it.

The ask

The Army and Congress can encourage this model with three decisions. First, buy interceptors the way the military buys ammunition: in quantity, on a steady schedule, with the expectation that they will be used. Second, fund iteration instead of perfection. A program that rewards a better version every few months will outperform one that rewards a flawless version in five years. Third, reward vendors who test in the open. Companies willing to put their systems in front of soldiers and against real targets, and to publish what they learn, should have an advantage over those who stay behind the slide deck. Cheap drones will keep getting cheaper and smarter. The nation that answers them with interceptors that are affordable to fire and quick to improve will hold the advantage, and the buying decisions that make that possible are available now.

• Brett Velicovich is CEO of Powerus.