Event
Drone vulnerabilities and the threat of directed energy weapons
Director's Fellow John Miller on how drone warfare has evolved over the past decade, and what it means for future conflict.
By John Miller, ·
On Friday 23rd January, Director's Fellow John Miller gave a seminar on how drone warfare has evolved over the past decade and what it means for future conflict.
He traced the shift from expensive, high-end systems like the Predator and Reaper to cheap, mass-produced DJI-scale platforms now central to the war in Ukraine, where entire units are dedicated to drone production, modification, and employment. John highlighted how existing taxonomies of drones fail to capture operational realities, and explained his current research on drone fault hierarchies and vulnerabilities, including GPS spoofing, communications jamming, and emerging directed-energy threats.
He noted that while many electronic warfare risks can be mitigated through advanced signal processing and software, high-energy lasers pose a growing challenge as more states develop scalable directed-energy systems. His ongoing work explores low-cost sensing solutions that could help drones detect laser targeting in milliseconds and enable swarm-level evasive behaviours, with implications for both U.S. doctrine and adversary counter-drone strategies.