Every military in the world is now confronting a frightening new reality.

A weapon no longer needs to cost millions of dollars to cause enormous damage. A relatively inexpensive drone can fly hundreds of miles, carry an explosive payload, and strike a military base, power station, apartment building, or crowded city.

Even just one drone is dangerous. But hundreds of inexpensive drones arriving at once can overwhelm even the most sophisticated defense systems.

That is the brilliance of this new strategy. The attacker launches cheap drones in enormous numbers, while the defender is forced to fire expensive missiles to destroy them one by one. When the sky is filled with threats approaching simultaneously, there may simply be too many objects to shoot down in time.

Last week, Israel Aerospace Industries unveiled a revolutionary new defense system called Hypnosis.

It is described as a “soft-kill” weapon. Instead of physically destroying each drone with a missile, Hypnosis is designed to deal with large numbers of drones at once by disrupting or spoofing the satellite navigation signals guiding them. This is especially valuable when traditional kinetic interceptors would struggle against the sheer number of airborne objects.

The brilliance of Hypnosis is not just jamming the drones and causing them to lose their signal. Such systems already exist and so the drones are equipped with countermeasures to resist jamming.

This new technology can feed an entire swarm with counterfeit navigation signals. The drone does not explode. It does not fall from the sky. It does not even realize that anything has gone wrong.

It continues flying confidently. Its systems appear normal.

But it has been deceived. It is flying away from the very destination it believes it is approaching.

When I read about this new electronic warfare that does not physically interfere with the drone itself but rather targets its navigation system by transmitting spoofed satellite-navigation signals, I began thinking about........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)