Small drones and the protection of the UK defence estate
An open-source assessment of whether the United Kingdom can protect its defence estate against commercially derived quadcopters and first-person-view drones.
Research & analysis
Articles
Writing on emerging security risks, critical infrastructure and the decisions organisations make when the evidence is incomplete.
The cheapest counter-drone system is a roof
Active defences can be defeated or designed around. A roof has no false-positive rate, needs no operator and protects the target even when nobody detects the drone.
Nobody buys detection until after the first incident
Counter-drone investment repeatedly follows the incident that justified it. The pattern says less about competence than it does about how organisations allocate money against unfamiliar risks.
Gatwick lost £50 million and nobody ever found a drone
Gatwick lost around thirty hours and roughly £50 million to sightings whose physical cause was never established. The operational lesson is about ambiguity, not simply airport security.
Distance is not a defence
The point of employment needs to be near the target, not near the sponsor. Remoteness can work in the opposite direction to conventional protection because fewer people are present to notice.