Key point: Drones can be used to counter drones and the military wants to have a lot of small, coordinated UAVs ready to fight.

WASHINGTON – Future small armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can form swarms of hundreds of mini, precision-guided explosives, overwhelm radar or simply blanket an area with targeting sensors. Kris Osborn at The National Interest reports. Continue reading original article

The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:

22 Oct. 2019 -- They can paint or light up air, ground, or sea targets for enemy fighters, missiles or armored vehicles, massively increasing war zone vulnerability. The can instantly emerge from behind mountains to fire missiles at Army convoys, infantry on the move or even mechanized armored columns.

They can increasingly operate with less and less human intervention and be programmed to enter enemy airspace, crossing into well-defended areas with decreased risk. Finally, perhaps of greatest significance, many of them can now fire weapons with little human intervention.

Overall, the Army is fast-tracking what could be called an entire sphere of defensive weapons to counter swarming drone weapons; these include Electronic Warfare innovations to jam enemy drone signals, Stryker-mounted Hellfire missiles to shoot drones out of the sky and -- in a Raytheon effort with the Army -- create an integrated “sense-track-hit” counter-drone kill chain.

This article by John Keller originally appeared on Military & Aerospace Electronics in 2019.