Drone News, page-350

An Australian company is supplying home-grown anti-drone weapons to Ukraine to defend its forces from Russian attacks in an example of how cheaper modern and accessible technology is reshaping the battlefield.

Sydney-based DroneShield, which is listed on the ASX, was founded seven years ago after identifying a gap in the market for technology to counter intrusions from commercially available drones that have been adapted for military uses.

“We had a vision that drones - and we’re talking small hand-held ones, not big airplane-sized things - like any technology were going to become a threat,” chief executive Oleg Vornik said.

“People are taking small drones, like the ones you can buy at JB Hi-Fi for $2000, putting a grenade on them and flying them over a crowd or a tank and releasing the grenade. You can basically build a $3000 machine to destroy a $5 million piece of equipment that your enemy has.”

The company already sells to militaries and law enforcement agencies in about 100 countries and recently completed its first shipment of weapons to Ukraine.

The company is supplying hand-held radio-sized devices that can detect enemy drones along with its Drone Gun to “shoot” them down by jamming electronic frequencies.

A small, unnamed European country that was already a customer purchased the DroneShield weapons to gift to the Ukrainians, but Mr Vornik said the company was now in talks with the Australian government to supply additional units.

“We literally received a few dozen inquiries from various Ukrainian government agencies over the last month that we need DroneShield equipment,” he said.

“We are hopeful of getting the Australian government or maybe somebody else to get our gear funded so we can get it over there.”

Mr Vornik said because the Russians had not gained air superiority over Ukrainian forces, the Russians were relying heavily on the smaller drones to gather battlefield intelligence.

“They would essentially scout in an area and see Ukrainian positions and then send artillery shells in that direction. Our equipment would take out those scouting drones,” he said.

“The fascinating thing with the Russian drones which may sound surprising is they use a lot of non-Russian parts. They use a lot of American parts, European parts, Chinese parts.

“I was worried when we did the first sale because I wasn’t sure how effective our gear was going to be because we’ve never tested it against Russian technology before. But it seems because they are using a lot of foreign parts, our equipment is effective against it.

“The feedback from the war front has been positive in terms of the impact against Russian drones.”

Mr Vornik said small drones had been used in both the Russian-Ukrainian war as well as fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020.

But there were also civilian targets that needed protection from drone attacks, Mr Vornik said, citing how terrorists could use them to threaten to poison water supplies or crowds of people.

“On other applications we see criminals smuggle contraband into prisons. Prisons are really well defended from the ground but completely defenceless from the air so things like cigarettes, escape kits, weapons, cell phones, drugs [are getting in],” he said.

”Plane-spotters fly drones around airports to watch planes landing and taking off. They used to be standing at the boundary of airports but now they fly drones right into the facility and that’s a problem because if one of those drones with lithium-ion batteries and metal parts gets sucked into an engine that could blow out the engine, or smash the windscreen and create potentially the downing of the aircraft.”

DroneShield’s customers include the Australian Defence Force, and it has a pipeline of $155 million in sales for 2022, rising to $170 million a year later.