Army taking helm of counter-UAS effort for DOD, specifics to be determined

The Army has been put in charge of an effort to combat threats posed by small unmanned aircraft systems for the Defense Department, but the service has not yet given the responsibility to a specific office or command.

Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord last week announced the Army was named DOD's "executive agent" for counter-UAS and will lead a project to field three to five systems next year.

Lord told reporters at the Pentagon Dec. 10 she wants DOD to "coalesce" around "the critical few" that can either shoot down a small enemy drone or disable it through electronic warfare.

Army spokesman Jason Waggoner told Inside Defense this week, "The specifications on the systems have not been determined yet. Our current focus is to reduce duplication of effort and unnecessary redundancy across the Department of Defense counter-small unmanned aircraft systems enterprise."

"The Army cannot commit to funding, schedules, deployments, and so forth, until it's had [the] opportunity to assess current materiel solutions and synchronize departmental processes," Waggoner added.

Specific leaders for the effort have not been named either.

"One of the threats seen in every [military area of operation] as well as at [U.S. military installations] are a variety of different drones, often small, difficult to detect with typical sensor packages we have," Lord said last week.