Extract from the Defence Committee's evidence session on
Domestic Threat of Drones
Tuesday 3 September 2019
Members present: (Chair); ; .
Witnesses
Dr Anna Jackman,
Royal Holloway, University
of London, and Arthur Holland
Michel, Center
for the Study
of the Drone, Bard College, New
York.
: ...You
mentioned the work of the Federal
Aviation Administration and
the Department of Homeland Security in the
US. Are there other countries where we
ought to be looking at the work they undertake in this
field?
Arthur Holland Michel: There
are a couple of other places where work is happening in this
space. I should add a caveat to all this, which is
that there is an abysmal lack of transparency with regards to
CUAS. I have gone to so many manufacturers and said, “Has your
system been used for any successful intercepts
in real operations?” They say, “Yes, of course.” I say, “Can you
give me an example?” They say, “No.” That
hinders information sharing, and our sense of what works and what
doesn’t.
Having said that, NATO has a working group
specifically focused on these issues. The FBI has done several
CUAS deployments. Again, it has not released
information publicly about that, but any large, prominent event
in the US now will have a presence by the FBI CUAS team. Israel
is at the forefront of the deployment of CUAS. There
is little public information about this, with one notable
exception. During the recent Eurovision contest
in Tel Aviv, the Israeli police had an extensive deployment of a
CUAS team, involving hundreds of people, which gives
you a sense of the labour-intensiveness of the technology. They
had a number of successful detections and
intercepts. They used Chinese Hikvision jamming rifles and they
seem to be disposed to speak publicly about that operation. That
is one good place to see what works and what does
not.
However, I should note that in conversations that I have
had with people who work on this, one of the
problems that even operational folks are coming up against is
that there is a dearth of information, because there
has not been a terrorist attack with a drone in one of these
environments in the west. Whereas we are pretty well
prepared to deal with suicide bombing attacks—because many have
happened in the past, so we have a wealth of data as to what
works and what does not—we have not had a single UAS
attack that we can draw upon. Gatwick is a notable exception,
but, of course, it was not a kinetic terrorist
attack. That leads to a scary conclusion: this will get better
once there are attacks. Of course, we want to
prevent them before they happen. That is the paradox that we are
operating within at the moment.
Also, the European Commission is doing quite a
lot of work on UCAS. They have a high-level conference on CUAS in
October in Brussels. I can pass you information
about that, if it is of interest.
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full evidence session
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