The Joint C-sUAS Office (JCO), established in 2020 to tackle the drone threat, hosted two C-sUAS demonstrations at Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) last year with the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office (RCCTO) to give industry the opportunity to show their latest technology.
In the demo scenarios, the testers gave the competitors geographic boundaries for a notional forward operating base (FOB) that the systems had to defend against incoming flying threats.
The two primary data points that testers sought were the range of effectiveness—how close could a threat get before the counter-UAS system stopped it—and how long it took to defeat the threat system. In some cases, a threat system wasn’t completely destroyed, but was impacted to an extent that it couldn’t get close enough to pose a threat to the mock FOB.
