December 2023: Drone swarms move around Langley Air Force base for 17 days, in a still-mysterious event.
Jan. 28, 2024: In what is called the Tower 22 Incident, an enemy drone follows a U.S. drone back to a U.S. base in Jordan and kills two soldiers.
February 2022 to present: A Russian war on Ukraine has included extensive drone warfare.
Feb. 28, 2026, to present: The U.S. and Israel attack Iran, in a war that has seen Iran respond with drone strikes throughout the Gulf region, including the economically vital Strait of Hormuz.
If warfare’s future is now, it is also changing with each new development for drones, or unmanned aircraft systems. Virginia Tech cut the ribbon Friday on its new Counter-UAS Testing and Research Center, a joint project with the Army. Its goal is to fight drones that could threaten military, law enforcement and infrastructure.
Government, military and university officials got a look on Friday at high-speed drones and the tools that may eventually counter them.
Introducing the results of a multiyear project based at the university’s Kentland Farm, they cut a ribbon tied on one end to an Echodyne Echoshield radar, a common instrument to counter drones. The other end was tied to a hybrid-wing vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, one of the many potential threats that Virginia Tech has replicated for its drone library.
Behind them, on a hill with a 360-degree view of the farmland, stood a 20-foot-high, 20-by-25-foot platform where the radar will stand and researchers will test drone detection and mitigation systems. To their right stood a modular building with monitoring equipment attached to the telescopes behind the ribbon.
All of it will be in use as the Army delivers drone counter systems for testing at the Virginia Tech-owned farm.
“It’s not like just one missile type that you’re defending against,” said John Coggin, associate director of Virginia Tech’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Project, or MAAP. “The threat is very broad. There’s thousands of different varieties of drones, and it changes every day.
“As soon as the adversary develops an offense against a certain drone, they change the drone to use a different command link or a different [propeller] size. It changes the acoustic signature or the article signature, and so it’s this cat-and-mouse game that’s constantly going on.”
What’s going on up there?
Discussing the list of incidents at the top of this story, MAAP director Tombo Jones said he took the loss of life personally.
“I used to be in the Army, so that’s heartbreaking to know that those types of security breaches are happening,” he said.
Now he and the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Project are teamed with the university’s National Security Institute for work that could stop such attacks. Under a contract with the Army, they built the facility on the farm, along with an indoor testing facility, a virtual lab and a variety of drones to fly against the sensors.
Their job now is to test the sensors, drone detection systems that vendors have presented to the Army for possible purchase, Jones said. They’re going beyond the sales pitch and on to the true evaluation, he said in an interview prior to the Friday event.
Jones shared a comment he heard in a government counter-UAS work group. They’re working to make sure that U.S. soldiers, airmen, Marines and critical infrastructure are protected by the best system, not the best salesperson, Jones said.
“You want to make sure that we’re doing our part to make sure that they have the resources necessary,” Jones said.
The team can mount multiple systems for testing on the hilltop platform. They’ll fly drone swarms, ultra-fast drones and other unmanned vehicles against them, testing multiple counter systems at once, which Jones said will save labor and time, and therefore money, for the Army.
Sensing from high ground gives them the elevated line of sight that they would have when positioned at a military base.
“They can see better and have better distance to be able to detect the drones coming,” Jones said. “And so we’re trying to replicate exactly what we would expect to see as they’re deployed in the field.”
The 1,800-acre working farm, which has shared space with drone testers for more than a decade, provides room to possibly surprise a sensor or see how quickly it detects what’s coming, from how far away and how well it can anticipate the incoming object’s track.
Some of the sensors will mitigate the unmanned aerial systems as they approach, he said. The most common methods are by jamming or takeover.
With jamming, Jones said, “You flood the drone with the same RF [radio frequency] signal that it’s sending out, and then it becomes confused. It’s unable to listen to its controller.”
A takeover is the safest way to go, but you have to know the drone’s language to control it, and drones speak all sorts of different ways, Jones said. Getting to that information and turning it on the attacker quickly is going to require a lot of research.
The indoor and virtual labs will help researchers investigate the future of technologies to counter unmanned aerial systems in ways that won’t be dangerous on the farm grounds.
“Those all complement each other,” Jones said. “In the indoor lab, we can test things in a sterile environment. We can replicate what a drone looks like digitally and see if a system can detect the RF signal and then recognize it, for example.
“And there’s some other things they have us do in that lab I can’t talk about.”
How it got here
Virginia Tech’s drone story started in 2013, when the university received one of seven designations from the Federal Aviation Administration for a drone test site program. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., was instrumental in getting it done, Virginia Tech President Tim Sands said at the Friday gathering.
“It’s remarkable to see the senator’s early involvement has come full circle today,” Sands said.
Three years ago, Sands directed university officials to develop more national security and defense work on campus, Jones said last week. The school’s Government and Community Relations Team, led by Christopher Yianilos, suggested teaming the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Project with the National Security Institute, and from there, they began discussions with the Pentagon, Jones said.
With help from Warner, U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, and U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Westmoreland County, the Virginia Tech team got a $5 million contract from the Army.
“If you hear that list, I mean, it’s pretty great, because if you think about it, it’s really bipartisan,” Jones said.
Warner and Griffith were among those at the ribbon-cutting. Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that the U.S. has not learned enough “from the complete transformation of warfare” brought on by the Ukraine-Russia conflict.
“I say this to our friends on the military side: I kept begging, had we learned all the lessons? Well, as we started the conflict in Iran, clearly we’ve not learned all the lessons, when we continue to shoot off missiles that cost two and a half million dollars a pop to take down an Iranian drone that costs 40,000 [dollars] a pop,” Warner told the gathering. “The Ukrainians have figured out how to do it at about five grand a pop.”
Warner credited “an incredible blessing,” good work from the Department of Homeland Security and others, plus “partially luck” that a catastrophic drone attack hasn’t happened in the U.S.
“This effort is extraordinarily important,” he said. “Drones are the future of warfare. … and one of our biggest vulnerabilities is the counter-drone activities, and this kind of experimentation is extraordinarily important for our defense and protection of the nation.”
