House authorizers call for AFRL briefing on counter-drone C5 risks

The House Armed Services intelligence, emerging threats and capabilities subcommittee is calling out issues posed by counter-unmanned aerial system operations and directing the Air Force Research Lab to testify about development of these capabilities.

In its mark of the fiscal year 2020 defense policy bill, the subcommittee states "that countering UAS operations presents a special series of unmet communications, command and control, cyber, computation, and intelligence challenges at the tactical edge."

The legislation would require the chief of AFRL's information directorate to provide a briefing to the full committee by this October on several C-UAS capabilities.

These capabilities include technologies that "facilitate UAS detection and geolocation, determination of individual and swarm behavior, dissection of swarms to identify critical nodes, situational awareness, elucidation of threats and mission intent, and counter-UAS capabilities."