Costco-bought drones and a communications dependency that did not exist in the Cold War days when he began his career are two of the biggest worries U.S. Central Command leader Gen. Frank McKenzie sees on the horizon.
“It’s a new component of warfare,” McKenzie said Wednesday of the proliferation of small unmanned aerial platforms in his theater, which covers the Middle East and Central Asia, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’m not talking about the large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet and we can see and deal with as with any other platform. I’m talking about one that you could go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for $1,000,” McKenzie said on a virtual discussion hosted by the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Institute.
“A four-quad rotorcraft or something like that, they could be launched and flown, and with very simple modifications, it could be made into something that can drop a weapon, a hand grenade, or something else,” he said. “I worry about our ability to protect against swarms of those craft, and you know a lot of people are working on that.”
He added, “Right now, the cost and position curve is against us. It’s harder to defend against than it is to create those things.”
McKenzie said the Army has taken the lead on counter-UAS, or counter-unmanned aerial systems, a priority with the attention of the secretary of defense.
“Eventually, I think you’re gonna see manned aircraft that are going to be supported by unmanned aircraft flying as parts of that system,” he said, postulating about the future of air warfare.
On his wide-ranging Middle East Institute discussion with president Paul Salem, McKenzie also spoke about the danger of a dependency on wideband communications methods and satellites.
“The first 10 years of my career, we were trying to fight the Russians, and I was trained to not expect to be able to communicate in that tactical environment,” he said.
As a Marine infantryman, McKenzie said he was taught to operate without using his radio.
“Then, over the 20 or 30 years that followed, we became addicted to communications and particularly to the wideband dissemination of information that the exploitation of satellites brings,” he said. “That era is drawing to an end.”
Space is no longer an uncontested domain, he said.
“We’re back sort of where I began my career, where your no longer can count on all that gigabyte of data that’s going to flow down to you,” he said. “In fact, if you transmit and emanate, you’re going to be targeted and hit, either kinetically or just as lethally in terms of operations, non-kinetically by some form of cyber operation.”
McKenzie summed up: “Those two things worry me as much as coronavirus or even more going forward.”
