In 1935, Britain developed a remote-controlled unmanned aircraft called the "queen bee," using it as a flying target for anti-aircraft gunnery training. Impressed by it, the U.S. Navy also ordered its development through Commander Delmar Fahrney of the Bureau of Aeronautics. He built four prototypes and gave them a name that contrasted with the queen bee: "drone," meaning a male bee. Today, unmanned aircraft are collectively called drones and are used in a wide range of fields, including military and civilian applications. In particular, in the Ukraine war, now in its fourth year, and the Iran war that broke out this February, drones have been deployed on a massive scale to the point of determining the course of battle.
The development of "anti-drone" and "counter-drone" technologies that take down drones only accelerated in the 2000s. The safest and simplest method is the soft kill, which disrupts communication signals. Representative techniques include jamming, which interferes with radio waves, and spoofing, which forges Global Positioning System (GPS) signals. But as artificial intelligence (AI) technology and other features have been applied to drones, disrupting them with soft kills has become more difficult. This is because drones can find their way to a target by comparing surrounding terrain features on their own. As a result, hard kill technology, which brings down drones by inflicting physical impact, is becoming more important. In particular, competition among major countries is fierce in developing directed energy weapons (DEW), which burn down drones by firing laser beams and high-power electromagnetic waves, and interceptor drones, which collide with and detonate drones.
In Korea, a national standard (KS) for testing the performance of anti-drone technology was recently enacted and announced. The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards joined hands with the Defense Acquisition Program Administration and the Defense Agency for Technology and Quality to lay the foundation for the development and commercialization of counter-drone technology. However, it shows limitations because it focuses mainly on jamming. Standards for testing hard kill performance are hard to find. Anti-drone radar tests were also designed to be conducted with drones arranged at 20-meter intervals. It is questionable whether this will promote the development of technology capable of detecting even ultra-small swarm drones. The preparation of this standard took as long as five years, which likely made it difficult to sufficiently reflect the latest trends. Authorities must conduct practical research on the Iran war and the Ukraine war and hurry to establish follow-up standards that encompass next-generation technologies.
