Fighting tomorrow’s war: our view of battlefield counter-UAS procurement challenges in 2024

There is an age-old military adage that tomorrow’s war will be fought at the junction of four maps and will start at 3am on a public holiday in the middle of a snowstorm. The challenge facing counter-UAS planners, procurers and practitioners in 2024 is somewhat different. The lessons from Ukraine suggest that there are now four fundamental requirements to the way battlefield counter-UAS systems now need to be procured and deployed: at unusual speed, at massive scale, at affordable costs and in ways which make them easy or intuitive to use.

The speed issue is twofold. The glaring issue is the slow pace of the administrative processes that govern how new technology is developed, evaluated, tested, certified, integrated and fielded. New solutions are often obsolete by the time they reach the front line; in Ukraine currently new generations of battlefield drone threats emerge every six months. Unconfirmed reports from Ukraine in the last few days suggest Russia has started using drones equipped with machine vision and automatic target acquisition as part of a strategy of deploying new autonomous capabilities.