As concerns about homeland drone attacks persist, the Pentagon is looking for ways to combat everything from nuisance hobbyists to adversarial drone activity—including options that don’t include shooting them down. To that end, the Army is funding a new research center at Virginia Tech to test the limits and develop training for non-kinetic counterdrone technologies.
“Kinetic is the old way. It’s the right way for many applications and systems when you need to guarantee immediate death. It’s part of a layered defense system, but non-kinetic offers a ton of benefits,” said Austin Phoenix, the director of Virginia Tech’s National Security Institute’s Mission Systems Division. “The ability to hack or take over or basically trick a [unmanned aerial system] into landing safely is always going to be the preferred operation for both DOD and local law enforcement to ensure that no one is going no one is going to be put at undue risk from that event.”
That’s particularly true for protecting critical infrastructure or military bases. Drone warfare has increasingly become a military priority, giving troops the ability to take systems down whether they’re mounted or on foot. Plus, the Pentagon wants “low-collateral defeat” counter-drone tech that can reduce risks to friendly forces.
The Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command C5ISR Center recently awarded Virginia Tech $5 million for a research center with the goal to start testing in January 2026.
“One of its critical missions is going to be both demonstrating and quantifying the performance of counter-UAS systems in realistic environments, but also bringing all counter-UAS operators together to train and test and operate these counter-UAS systems in as realistic environments as we can generate,” Phoenix said. The ultimate goal is to bring operators across the military together to “evaluate what a real counter-UAS threat would look like and demonstrate the consequences of poor equipment or poor operation.”
The Army is testing a slew of drone and counterdrone technologies in formations as part of its transformation in contact initiative, including non-kinetic options that allow troops to override an enemy drone’s mission so it can land safely in a designated location.
Non-kinetic options include jamming, which temporarily cuts the drone’s signal so it can’t go home, but can affect more than just the suspicious drone; spoofing, which swaps signals with the drone to give it new directives; and cyber takeover.
Defense One saw D-FEND Solutions’ radio frequency-based cyber takeover solution—which can be mounted on a tactical tripod, vehicle or backpack—in action. It allows operators to track and detect nearby drones within 5 kilometers, labeling them as “suspect” or “friendly.” The software solution also allows users to designate a digital safe zone that replaces the drone’s home location with a new one during a takeover.
The scenario happened multiple times during the course of nearly an hour over a large field in Northern Virginia. I never got used to the buzz of the not-quite-visible drones flying somewhere overhead. Each time a UAS was “reprogrammed” by the press of a button on a touchscreen, the pilot would no longer have control. The change was visible as the flight pattern went from mildly frenetic to zen-like before the drone landed softly in the grass and powered off. The “take over” mitigation scenario can be initiated within a range of about 2.5 kilometers.
“Non-kinetic and low-collateral defeat are critical areas for the United States to be investing in to protect, you know, critical infrastructure from both nefarious and hobbyist drone enthusiasts as we move into the future,” Phoenix said.
“Drone operation around airports can be extremely disruptive and while we do hear a lot of stories of late about drones being in places they shouldn’t, we have yet to see both an accidental or nefarious act that really hurt someone caused by misuse of drones, either in the wrong place or intentional misuse of these systems. And so non-kinetic enables us to react much more quickly. And the bar to do both jamming and the cyber interdiction is much lower than a kinetic kill, enabling a whole new group of people to operate in those spaces.”
