Drones typically make the news for striking terrorists, delivering a pizza or potentially delivering packages from Amazon. There is one drone scenario government officials hope does not make the news.
Military officials are proactively planning how to counter drones carrying chemical or biological weapons,reports Defense One. The Pentagon has created an official program called Thunderstorm to develop a defense system.
They have already placed a request for information (RFI) out to vendors such as private companies and universities to issue contracts for the development of the defense systems.
One part of the request involves making drones with chemical or biological weapons detectors. The challenge is to develop detectors small enough to fit on the drones, collect samples and return them to a lab to be analyzed. The other part of the request is how to take down robot swarms carrying chemical or biological weapons.
Currently, Domestic Drone Countermeasures sells kits civilians can use at home to detect drones. However, the kits do not track or identify toxic materials.
The Air Force's Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) is currently testing its system used for tracking ground and maritime targets.
The next step is to develop technology to take down dirty drones.
Currently, the military uses radar jamming which distorts communications with its operator. Raytheon has a $10 billion contract with the Defense Department to develop a jammer with more advanced capabilities.
"We can expect that our adversaries will increasingly use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and our expeditionary forces must deal with that rising threat," said Col. William Zamagni, the head of the Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department.
By 2020, in the United States there could be 30,000 UAVS in the skies, according Todd Humphreys, who directs the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin.
In the future, "If detection technology can be made small and cheap enough, the ultimate weapon against swarms of cheap drones will likely be swarms of cheap drones," according to Defense One.
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