Are bird-sized drones the next-gen of defence aircraft?

Joni Sytsma, the chief innovation officer at Department 13, an Australian company delivering unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) solutions, would argue for the most part, smaller drones are superior.

“I think it all starts with cost, or as I like to think about it, bang for your buck,” she said. “Twenty years ago, you’d have to have a big airplane worth tens of millions of dollars flying around and now, all of a sudden, I can get the same information for just thousands of dollars. So, cost for performance is just so attractive in having really small platforms,” Sytsma says. Sytsma moved to Australia six years ago, after working at the US Air Force’s research laboratory studying hypersonics.

Smaller, but better

As technology continues to advance, it often seems to get smaller. Mobile phones, or telephones, were once large, colossal devices that stayed in one place. Despite some complaints over them getting big again in recent months, the palm-sized phones now fit into your pocket. The same goes for satellites; once, satellites typically weighed thousands of kilograms, and now can boast less than 10. But does smaller still mean good quality? Again, Sytsma would argue that they are. “In aerospace, you get what you pay for,” she says. “I think price performance from a quality perspective has only gone up to the point that you can build trusted autonomous systems that operate over your head in a cost-effective manner.”

Then, there’s the fact that they are nearly undetectable – a major priority of defence aircraft. “When you have an airplane that’s flying high in the sky, every radar in the world can see it. So, all of a sudden, if you make it to something the size of a coffee cup, can anybody see it with any regular system?” Sytsma says. “You can have a bird flying around gathering data for you, that nobody knows is there.”

Smaller drones are also accessible to the average person, allowing even a basic soldier to mobilise it quickly and with ease. While this can also be a downside of smaller drones, Scott Basham, chief executive officer of XTEK, says the convenience outweighs the potential damage that could be made. “When he’s [a soldier] patrolling through the bush or the jungle or the Outback or the desert or wherever it might be, they can put them in a backpack and then it gives them great flexibility to get situational awareness and operational understanding of what’s in their immediate environment so they can throw out the drone,” he says.

On the other hand, Sytsma says the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) cares about drones not hurting civilians, and an element of cheaper, smaller drones, means convincing the agency that it is just as airworthy as larger, more sturdy drones – which is a hard task. “I think that’s a big problem in the field and can only be approached by spending more money on QA and testing and, making these hardware components really trusted for the application,” Sytsma says.

Australia buys into the small drone trend

As part of an ongoing contract to support the Department of Defence that began in 2017, Canberra-based XTEK won a new $2.75 million contract to supply its “Wasp” small unmanned aerial system (SUAS) platforms to the military in March. The company delivers its ballistics armor and its small drones to defence, and is an exclusive seller of the Wasp platforms, which are owned by United States company AeroVironment. The SUAS offering is designed to keep an eye in the sky on its opponents and will operate more discreetly than any other spy technology.

According to Scott Basham, the Wasp was chosen due to its longstanding proven capabilities.

“Wasp, in particular, has been around for a number of years prior, and is a well proven platform and it delivers all of the capabilities including being all environment,” he said. The overall contract between the ADF and XTEK was penned a few years ago, and Basham said that only until recently, there has been a ramp-up of other locally made, capable drones. But at the time – and still now – he believes the Wasp remains superior. “Early models of some Australian-made and other international models didn’t quite necessarily meet all of the requirements that defence was looking for at the time,” Basham said.

The Wasp is an all-environment drone, meaning it can be used anywhere and everywhere, such as the water and high in the sky. It has an endurance of 50 minutes, can be packed into a soldier’s bag with ease, and has a range of five kilometres line-of-sight. When it was first announced XTEK would deliver smaller drones to defence in 2017, the Australian government nodded to their previous success in Afghanistan and Iraq, and said it wanted that same capability for Australia.

What’s the catch with smaller drones?

All good things have a downside, including drones. Joni Sytsma says that smaller drones can cause far more havoc if in the wrong hands, because they are just that accessible and easy to handle. On 17 January last year, a swarm of small drones and ballistic missiles flew into the United Arab Emirates and successfully destroyed three oil refuelling vehicles and an area of Abu Dhabi’s international airport, killing three civilians. The attack was allegedly at the hands of the Houthi movement in Yemen, an Islamist political movement, and marked one of the most high-profile SUAS attacks of the decade, sparking fears over the damage small drones can make.

In a US Department of Defense (DoD) Counter-sUAS (C-sUAS) Strategy published that same month, it warned that these technology trends are “dramatically transforming legitimate applications of sUAS while simultaneously making them increasingly capable weapons in the hands of state actors, non-state actors and criminals”. Essentially, these low-cost systems can deliver military-like missions in the hands of anyone at any time. Drones previously viewed as “hobbyist toys” are now potential threats, according to the DOD. The US has made counter-SUAS a top priority to protect critical infrastructure and ensure defence is always aware of potential threats.

“Drones are probably one of the worst kinds of asymmetrical threats because with an extremely small cash layout, and a desire to do something wrong, you can cause massive, massive havoc with the drone,” Sytsma says. She stressed that in an instant, millions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure can be destroyed with something that can cost as much as $1,000. “I absolutely see that as the number one problem with drones, particularly these inexpensive, yet extremely capable commercial drones, they can cause some serious havoc, and yet cost almost nothing.”

Sytsma also says not all small drones can handle everything. “Military loves all-weather capability, so, they want to be able to do what their job is, whether there’s a hurricane going on, or a cyclone down here, or it’s torrential rain in Sydney, because if there’s a major flood, they might want to be able to fly drones,” she says. But small drones perform their worst in these conditions. “The smaller they get, the less they can handle. So, I think that’s a huge problem that is going to be extremely challenging, because to some extent, we can expect to do as good as nature, but doing better than nature requires ingenuity.”

Ultimately, diversity is key

However, while there are reasons both for and against smaller and larger drones, Sytsma believes it will never be one or the other in the military. “There’s going to be a place for the big system that can handle everything and then there’s going to be a place for something that’s a little bit smaller, maybe less capable, [with a] shorter range, and then all the way down to something else in the palm of your hands,” Sytsma says. While both large and small drones have their downsides, “diversification” in the fleet is key to having adaptable capability.

Small drones that weight less than 10 kilograms and large ones that resemble miniature planes are equally useful for the defence industry, but Basham says it is ultimately about being prepared. “I think you have to understand the capabilities of whatever solution you’re using, and then you need to have a mitigation or a workaround strategy to alleviate potential disadvantages,” he says. “It’s about understanding what the limitations are, and then mitigating around that.”