America’s drone-defense problem may be considerably different from the one we are currently trying to solve.
By Joe Cozart
The obvious problem is the drone. The harder problem is everything that has to happen after a drone appears.
Detection is only the beginning. Someone must classify what has been detected. Another system may have to maintain custody of it. Communications have to survive. Authority has to be established. An appropriate response has to be selected. Information may have to move among military, civilian, law-enforcement and infrastructure operators in seconds rather than minutes.
That means the emerging national vulnerability is not simply insufficient counter-UAS technology.
It is the absence of an operating architecture capable of making many different technologies behave like one system.
The distinction matters.
The United States already has an expanding inventory of radars, sensors, jammers, interceptors, autonomous systems and software. What remains much less developed is a persistent environment in which those systems can repeatedly operate together under conditions designed to make them fail: degraded communications, GNSS denial, severe weather, competing air traffic, multiple vendors, changing missions and the loss of individual components.
The important question is therefore becoming less “Can this system stop a drone?” and more “Can the larger architecture continue functioning when several parts of it do not?”
That creates an interesting possibility for Grand Forks.
Grand Forks does not need to become merely another place where individual drone or counter-drone technologies are demonstrated. The considerably larger opportunity would be to create persistent access to the conditions in which autonomous systems actually have to prove themselves.
That is the logic behind ACCE:
Accelerated Capability through Contested Experimentation.
Accelerated, because the advantage increasingly belongs to whoever can shorten the cycle between failure, modification and redeployment.
Capability, because the real question is no longer whether an individual platform works, but whether an entire mission can still be accomplished.
Contested, because clean demonstrations reveal very little about what happens when communications degrade, navigation becomes uncertain, systems interfere with one another, weather deteriorates, or components fail.
Experimentation, because the objective is not simply to certify finished technology. It is to repeatedly challenge unfinished capability until it becomes operationally credible.
That is why ACCE should not be understood as another facility or another test range.
It is an operating environment.
Not access to a runway.
Not access to airspace alone.
Access to complexity.
Access to degraded communications. Access to contested navigation. Access to severe weather. Access to military users. Access to multiple systems operating simultaneously. Access to an environment where technologies from different companies are required to discover, classify, communicate, hand off, adapt and continue operating when something fails.
Grand Sky, UND, military operations, large-UAS experience, BVLOS infrastructure, northern weather and the region’s developing autonomous-systems ecosystem become strategically important not because any one of them solves the problem.
They become important because together they can potentially provide something much scarcer:
Access to the conditions required to build the next autonomous defense architecture.
A place where America rehearses drone defense before it needs drone defense.
That may ultimately be more consequential than attracting another manufacturer, another platform or another demonstration.
The next strategic advantage in autonomous warfare may belong not to the community that builds the best drone.
It may belong to the community that provides the access necessary for all the drones, sensors, networks and decision systems to learn how to operate together.
You cannot spell access without ACCE.
——— GMJoe™ ———
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