7 Habits of Highly Effective Counter UAS

Brandon Sasnett – Director of Threat Analysis Red Six Solutions, LLC :  Follow

So you want to conduct Counter UAS operations and don’t know where to start…

You could be a private security firm looking to protect your critical asset from nefarious overflights that impact personal security, intellectual property, or a combination of the two. You could be a military organization with a limited CUAS budget, struggling to identify critical tasks and technologies to apply that budget to. You could be a policy maker, a technologist, an entrepreneur, a law enforcement officer, or a platoon leader, all who could be tasked as their respective unit’s CUAS Subject Matter Expert – a title that comes with both great responsibility and, in the complex world of UAS threats, great confusion.

What I am about to walk you through is my own lessons learned and experiences in the CUAS world playfully mirrored against the 7 habits of highly effective people. This experience has seen successes and failures. I’ve had to learn a lot and, as any new emerging career with ill-defined roles and purpose, forget a lot too. Before I begin I will make a few assumptions. First, I will assume you have absolutely NO CUAS budget but have been tasked with fixing the billion-dollar problem. Most of the CUAS advice I provide is aimed at the premise of CUAS should cost equal or less than the UAS we are attempting to counter. However, I am NOT saying that CUAS technologies should be low cost. I mean they should in a perfect world. But we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in the real world and the real world is expensive. When you have assessed technologies effectively, you will always find someone to pay for it. If you want, I can walk through the best steps for accurately assessing potential CUAS technologies, just reach out to me directly. Another assumption I will make is that you are in support of a defined unit, organization, or company with a defined geographic footprint. If you want to take the later discussed steps and scale them up for the global fight, you should do so according to what resources you have on hand. If you have no resources, start small and win small. As you build it, they will come. I promise. Finally, and this purely my opinion, if you can grow a beard, do it. There is nothing more satisfying than the air whipping through your facial hair as you scout the burning wreckage of the drones you thwarted like the wizard you are. Plus, you save on razors.