Cheap drones are slipping past expensive air defenses, and the military needs to move faster to stop them, Epirus CEO Andy Lowery said on the Threat Status podcast.
Speaking with Ben Wolfgang and Guy Taylor at the Association of the United States Army conference in Washington, the retired Navy lieutenant commander said the services should field promising systems, learn from operators and adapt as they go.
[WOLFGANG] We’re here at the Association of the United States Army Conference, or AUSA, here in Washington, D.C. Incredible event, tons of cool technology on display, including some of the counter-drone tech that you all make right behind us here, Andy, which we’ll talk more about in a minute.
I mentioned Counter Drone. Your company says that it stops autonomous attacks. We’ll talk more about that specifically in a minute, but just kind of broadly give us the company’s mission statement and that there was kind of a gap in this market that you all are trying to fill.
[LOWERY] We kind of set our sort of high-level vision charter as stopping autonomous threats. And so in that, there’s a lot of detail, but more or less we specialize in what’s being called these days critical point defense, where we’re not necessarily in the large layers of traditional air defense, but we’re in these very small micro layers where you may not use Epirus’ systems to guard an entire airport, but you may use an Epirus system of systems to guard an end of a runway or a control tower or a passenger terminal. So we’re a very, very specific. point defense system that uses high-powered microwave as our anchor product to basically create large electromagnetic interference fields that deliver what would be akin to electromagnetic pulses.
So we’re basically taking out systems through interfering with the electronics, not jamming. This is not an electronic attack, electronic jammer. It’s using directed energy to basically stop the computers themselves from working, just like in an electromagnetic pulse type of a scenario.
[WOLFGANG] You mentioned airports. So I think that’s very much in the news right now, of course, because of what we’ve seen in Saudi Arabia over just the past few days. And I think that, you know, that comes on the heels of U.S. aircraft being taken down in the Iran war, U.S. bases coming under fire. We hear a lot about this concept of air dominance. But when you see some of those instances, you wonder, does the U.S. and allies really have air dominance in that theater? Is that an outdated concept when we look at air dominance, how that used to be defined? What does that mean today in 2026?
[LOWERY] Yeah, that’s a really great question. I think as we consider this layer. Let’s call it a new layer of warfare, a layer of attack warfare, just by evidence, you can no longer, I mean, just you talked about Riyadh on fire. We can no longer claim air dominance. No country, I think, in the world can claim air superiority, air dominance.
Now, I say that and I want to bifurcate my answer a little bit because when you consider traditional air defense, there’s still no other country greater than the U.S. at building basically Patriot missile systems, THAAD missile systems in these large geographical cylinders. But those large geographical cylinders were designed to go after elephants. It’s like bringing an elephant cage and an elephant gun. And we’re being overrun by mice, you know, and that’s what’s happening. It’s like just in that metaphorical type of a sense where we’re taking a big elephant gun and blasting it away at 100 mice that are running through the bars.
And what you’re seeing is critical, critical targets. In some cases, those very Patriot missile sites designed to build around those structural, geographical air defense cylinders, you’re seeing those taken out. And you’re seeing them taken out sometimes as close as 500 meters, 200 meters, where you’ll get pop-ups out of container trucks or pop-ups out of the weeds. And you’re not knowing where these things are coming from, but they’re poking us in the eye, jab, than uppercut. And so the traditional air defense cylinders, which we still do very, very well in, are being compromised by this new type of threat that is getting through the bars of the elephant cage, so to speak.
[WOLFGANG] You mentioned, I think you phrased it as directed energy. Like you’re the Leonidas HPM effector’s, you know, long, high-power microwave system for taking these things down. You could say it’s not jamming. That’s a different… This is, again, it’s like a 101-level question to you, but for the audience, can you explain the difference and why you think this approach is better than just going the jamming route?
[LOWERY] Jamming itself is a very effective measure if you can use the onboard systems to kind of penetrate and get into the electronics. So drones a lot of times will be flying with antennas, and those antennas might connect to GPS, they might connect to an RF signal, they might connect to something else, and they’re being sent control commands. And so if you can take over those control commands, if you can, with RF noise, blank out those control commands, you can confuse the drones, you can even take the drones over, you can get them to harmlessly land right in your feet.
Now the problem becomes when those control commands are either encrypted, highly encrypted, where you can’t penetrate the code and you can’t figure out what it’s saying to what, or and more so, we’re seeing fiber optic control drones that have no RF input and output. We’re seeing fully autonomous drones that are using just visual cameras and Google Maps to say, where am I flying? They don’t need GPS. They don’t need RF control commands. They can be told basically through AI where to fly, what to do, what the mission is. And then they just use passive sensing, passive cameras. So there’s no vector that you can enter with. So in those cases, that’s when EW becomes useless. It just absolutely is useless.
[TAYLOR] It’s so fascinating, this idea of EMP-style microwave counter-drone technology. My question is about electricity and power. I mean, if you go across the floor here to this Ukrainian pavilion, you’ll find guys over there that say, we don’t even have electricity half the year. We’re in this war. How do you generate enough electricity and power and battery power to actually make these systems reliable in the field? Are we talking about diesel engine generators? Just walk me through that. And is that kind of a problem in this?
[LOWERY] The thing about our particular approach to the problem, it’s actually, when you compare it to other equivalent systems, consumes much less power. We have a very, very high peak power to average power ratio. So a typical system, large system that could defend basically a control tower or radar site, a system of that size might draw 70 kilowatts of total generated AC power. Now, that’s if you want to continuously operate it. We also include, onboard our system, lithium-ion batteries that can be charged like a Tesla car so that you can sustain some amount of operation. Now it’s not forever, but some amount of operation, it could be hours. And when you’re talking about just 10-second, 15-second engagements, those hours can stretch to a whole number of different drone attacks. So we are flexible, we’re flexible and we’re agile.
People were interested in these podcasts
Watch the video for the full conversation
Click here for the Threat Status podcast
Click here to receive the daily Threat Status newsletter delivered directly to your inbox.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.