WASHINGTON — The US military needs to quickly develop affordable methods to counter small unmanned drones used by Islamic State terrorists to move explosives into an area, the Air Force’s top civilian urged Monday.
As military operations in Iraq and Syria continue, US forces are encountering an “emerging threat” of unmanned aerial systems, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said at a Center for a New American Security event. Over the past several weeks, there have been multiple instances of Islamic State operators in Iraq and Syria buying cheap, off-the-shelf UAS and equipping them with explosives — basically using them as flying bombs, with sometimes fatal results.
“A week or two ago that there was a situation and four were killed — they were not US citizens — from one of these small unmanned systems,” she said.
“How do we put our heads together on that topic quickly and figure out how to defeat that type of approach?” James continued. “It's not necessarily the development of a new thing to defeat it. It could be taking what we've gotten already and packaging that in a different way to go after that threat, but we need to do that more rapidly."
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