« It is virtually impossible to defend against drones »

It was the Unit­ed States, in the ear­ly 2000s, that start­ed using drones to elim­i­nate ter­ror­ist tar­gets in the trib­al areas of Pak­istan and Afghanistan. At the time, they were big machines. They looked like fight­er jets, flew high and could not be oper­at­ed by civil­ians or ter­ror­ists. But those days are gone for good.

Yes, they are now being used more and more for civil­ian appli­ca­tions, which is very inter­est­ing. For exam­ple, farm­ers can use small, inex­pen­sive drones (cost­ing from €600) to spread fer­tilis­er equal­ly over fields. The prob­lem? These are the same drones that will be bought by drug traf­fick­ers or ter­ror­ist groups, divert­ed from their intend­ed use. Mex­i­can car­tels, for exam­ple, buy agri­cul­tur­al drones and replace weed­killer sprayers with the same weight of grenades weigh­ing around 10–20 kg. These days, it’s almost as easy to make your own drone kit as it is to assem­ble a piece of Ikea fur­ni­ture! You can also adapt it to your par­tic­u­lar needs, with a bat­tery that lasts longer or short­er, a cam­era of vary­ing res­o­lu­tion, and a vari­able con­trol dis­tance. In short, there’s some­thing for every pur­pose and every price…

They are now used in all con­flicts, but they are par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful in cer­tain con­fig­u­ra­tions. In the war against Hamas, the Israelis can use them to get inside tun­nels. If they were only to send men to these loca­tions, the loss of life would be much higher.

Yes. The prob­lem with drones is that they are very easy and inex­pen­sive. Also, it’s very com­pli­cat­ed, if not impos­si­ble in some con­fig­u­ra­tions, to defend against them. For “sim­ple” attacks involv­ing a lim­it­ed num­ber of drones, there are, of course, sys­tems for detect­ing the intru­sion of a drone into a pro­tect­ed area (air­port, sta­di­um, etc.), then jam­ming its nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem, or destroy­ing the air­craft. How­ev­er, cer­tain so-called “swarm” attacks, which involve send­ing sev­er­al dozen – or even sev­er­al hun­dred – drones in mul­ti­ple direc­tions, are vir­tu­al­ly unstop­pable. Beyond thir­ty drones, it becomes com­pli­cat­ed to defend oneself.

Yes, I’m in charge of the sci­en­tif­ic com­mit­tee of the first Euro­pean fed­er­a­tion of secu­ri­ty drones, DRONES4SEC, launched in 2021.We are work­ing on anti-drone mod­el­ling. For exam­ple, in a swarm attack con­fig­u­ra­tion, we are try­ing to cal­cu­late how many drones need to be launched at the same time, at what speed, along what tra­jec­to­ries and to neu­tralise as many hos­tile vec­tors as pos­si­ble. A tech­no­log­i­cal plat­form will be devel­oped for this purpose.

In addi­tion, at Euro­pean lev­el, we are work­ing with PARROT (Europe’s lead­ing drone man­u­fac­tur­er) on a ‘trust­ed drone’ label, which would guar­an­tee drone buy­ers that their flight data and per­son­al data will not be exfil­trat­ed each time they use a drone. Some drone man­u­fac­tur­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly Chi­nese ones, have major prob­lems with respect for per­son­al data. In fact, the main Chi­nese drone man­u­fac­tur­er, the world leader in the sec­tor, is now banned from sell­ing to secu­ri­ty forces in North Amer­i­ca for this very reason.

Turkey, India, Iran, and Israel are all very active in the pro­duc­tion of civil­ian and mil­i­tary drones. While nuclear weapons are still reserved for a very select club of major pow­ers, drones are on the way to becom­ing “the poor man’s weapon”. Fixed-wing drones car­ry­ing 2–3 kg of explo­sives are used as kamikaze drones against all kinds of high-val­ue tar­gets: armoured vehi­cles, tanks, artillery, sup­ply trucks, radar, and com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tems. These prowl­ing muni­tions rep­re­sent a minor rev­o­lu­tion in the “art of war”. With very low pro­duc­tion costs and almost infi­nite mul­ti­pli­ca­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties, these muni­tions can be used to destroy high­ly tac­ti­cal tar­gets on the ene­my’s side, which are often very cost­ly. The destruc­tion ratio (i.e. the cost of the prowl­ing muni­tion ver­sus the cost of the tar­get) clear­ly favours the attack­er and forces the attacked to deploy sophis­ti­cat­ed and cost­ly means of protection.

Yes. An aer­i­al drone ded­i­cat­ed to intel­li­gence can remain in the air for 24 hours, with­out a pilot on board, while car­ry­ing out its data-gath­er­ing mis­sion. Oth­ers are designed for com­bat or artillery guid­ance. Quad­copter micro-UAVs (with four pro­pellers) are used by the Russ­ian and Ukrain­ian armies to “clear” a trench by drop­ping grenades ver­ti­cal­ly on the tar­get­ed fight­ers, with cen­time­tre accu­ra­cy. These drones are often com­mer­cial indus­tri­al drones trans­formed into grenade launch­ers, using a rudi­men­ta­ry charge-car­ry­ing system.

Some can oper­ate in ful­ly auto­mat­ic mode, car­ry­ing out a mis­sion on a tar­get on their own and return­ing. Oth­er machines must always be under the con­trol of a remote pilot, from a greater or less­er dis­tance. Above all, there are drones for every envi­ron­ment: the air, but also land, sea, and even under­wa­ter robots! The Turks recent­ly demon­strat­ed three drone launch­es on the sur­face of the water, paint­ed blue so they could­n’t be spot­ted. They man­aged to cut the hull of a car­go ship in half at sea! It was only a test, but it gives you an idea of the pow­er of these machines…

The “Black Hor­net” is a micro recon­nais­sance drone that looks like a heli­copter, but mea­sures just 10 cm and weighs 30 g. The Amer­i­cans sell it for €40,000 but the Chi­nese have just put an inspired ver­sion on the mar­ket for 130 dol­lars! For this price, it weighs just 20g more than the orig­i­nal, is bare­ly any big­ger, and offers almost the same per­for­mance… The fall in the price of civil­ian drones and robots will lead to their wide­spread use in all areas of activity. 

There are more and more of them. Dur­ing the last earth­quake in Moroc­co, drones were sent inside build­ings that were still stand­ing to spot cracks and iden­ti­fy which could be saved and which could not. After the storms in France, some roofers used drones to spot miss­ing tiles on roofs and inter­vene direct­ly where necessary.

Interview by Marina Julienne