The addition of a small drone silhouette to the kill markings of an F-35A by the Dutch may appear like a clean tactical victory. It also throws into focus an issue that the current air-defense engineers continue to run into: expensive airplanes and inexpensive drones collide in a cost curve that is not favorable to the defender.
The interaction was a part of a rapid response situation in NATO managed airspace, where fighters are deployed to fast start checks to confirm the tracks, locate contacts, and intercept as necessary. There, strengths of the F-35 are manifested: sensor fusion, deep situational view, a range of weapons, which can be expanded between gun to the current state of the air air-to-air missiles. The disconnection starts with the expendable target being a drone or decoy which is designed to be so inexpensive that merely causing a reaction creates value.
Decoys are not filler, they are a design pattern. It requires only a drone, cheaply made and resembling the “real enough” to lure defenders into disclosing radar patterns, radio tactics, response time, and engagement privileges. It also pressures magazines. Once a defender begins to commit scarce interceptors, airtime, and maintenance capacity towards those objects to be sacrificed, the most desirable goal of an attacker has already been achieved: he or she has compelled the defense to spend more, learn less, and respond more slowly as the night progresses. Herein the F-35 kill marking begins to look less like a trophy and more like a ledger.
A Dutch study estimated the cost in the economics directly: an hour of air-time in an F-35 can cost approximately EUR40,000 an hour, and the drone category frequently engaged in such air-defense emergencies is much less expensive than a contemporary fighter mission. The engineering conclusion here is consistent across air forces, whether or not this is turned into a missile-cost issue, the system must have a layer that can counter small drones without the use of the same resources that is allocated to high-end threats.
The layered concept is more and more being framed as an architectural issue, i.e. detect, track, identify and defeat, instead of finding a single “silver bullet.” NATO has been categorical on the course of movement by having set up initiatives linked to the Operation Eastern Sentry interest in counter-drone sensors and weaponry as one package. The key point is that the sequence is detection and discrimination must become cheaper and more automated before defeat can become cheaper and more scalable.
Maturity in decoys is borrowed too: inundate and disorient sensors to create space to more useful effects. The same rational can be seen in the case of air-launched decoys such as the ADM-160 Miniature Air Launched Decoy (MALD), which is programmable, can loiter and has a signature designed to make air defenses pursue the false target it has set. The hardware is not like small one-way drones, however, the mission outcome is one that will require the spend of time, attention, and interceptors on a lost thing.
Through the longer arc, the same uncrewed systems are also driving NATO to perpetual sensing and “deterrence by detection” particularly in challenging environments. According to a recent evaluation of Arctic needs, uncrewed platforms can increase coverage and resilience and procurement and integration are still divided among allies, which restricts the availability of Arctic-ready platforms. That distance is important since inexpensive drones not only pose a threat to the target, but also overwhelm the boundaries amid sensors, command-and-control, and intercept alternatives. The F-35 can intercept drones. The engineering problem is to develop an air-defense stack capable of repeating it at scale, millions of times and without considering each tiny collision as if it were a fifth-generation hit.
