U of A to help U.S. develop defenses against drone attacks

The program “addresses critical needs in the defense of our homeland,” said David Hahn, dean of UA’s College of Engineering, in a media event Friday. Created in partnership with the non-profit Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, the program is called Advanced Education in Terrestrial Operations and Space or AETOS, and is named after the Greek golden eagle that was a messenger to the gods, Hahn said. 

“As the threats have evolved so rapidly from drones to thousands of drones to high-speed missiles to low-cost, mass-produced drones — how do we defend against that? It’s a paradigm shift,” said Hahn. “This effort isn’t a political or partisan effort; it’s a homeland security effort, it’s an American effort, and it’s to bring together the expertise across this university — our faculty, staff, students — to partner with our participants, which will be those coming from mostly the uniformed services.”

Hahn said the UA wants this program to be a “wonderful marriage of military experts” that targets rising stars and officers who will become generals and thought leaders in the future, and enmeshes them with academics at the UA for eight-month sessions. The mission is to create products, ideas and technologies that help advance homeland security, he said.

The collaborative training initiative will focus on “technology threats, opportunities and policy challenges related to near-space and terrestrial operations.” It starts in July this year and Hahn said they hope to make it a consistent, yearly program.

'Have to figure out how to defeat that'

Riki Ellison, founder and chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said the military damages the U.S. has faced in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, which started Feb. 28, are real, and the U.S. has to figure out how to defeat the threat posed by drones.

Six U.S. Army Reserve soldiers were killed, and more than 20 others were wounded on March 1 in an Iranian drone attack on a tactical operations center in Kuwait.

“The damages on the defensive side of protecting our bases forward were real, and our ability as a nation and as a world to be able to defeat low-flying drones that are cheap and (at a) massive scale is a challenge right now, and we have to figure out how to defeat that,” said Ellison.

The Russian war against Ukraine also illustrates the threats posed by automated drones in warfare, he noted. 

Through AETOS, Ellison, who grew up in Tucson and has family connections to the UA, will be renewing his connections to Tucson.

Ellison played on a state football championship team at Amphitheater High School here, then went on to the University of Southern California, where he won the 1978 national championship and two Rose Bowls. He also played professionally for 10 years as a starting middle linebacker with the San Francisco 49ers and the then-Los Angeles Raiders, winning three Super Bowl championships in 1984, 1988 and 1989.

AETOS is the third academic program his agency is a part of; the others are at USC and the University of Hawaii.

The UA program will be invitation-only, and participants will be reviewed and selected from a range of military commands. Hahn said a cohort of between 12 and 18 participants is expected this year.

It is not a profit-generating program at this point and will charge a tuition of about $10,000 per student, which the participants’ agencies can sponsor as well.

The learning objectives include:

• Understanding threats operating in near-space and challenges for terrestrial operations and space that face the U.S., Canada and Mexico;
• Identifying and developing new technologies to enable or counter near-space and terrestrial operations;
• Improving data and analytic models relied on to understand these threats and new technologies;
• Creating prototypes of applied technologies with federal research labs to turn ideas into real-life solutions;
• Developing capstone projects that will lead to courses of action resulting in warfighter capabilities and congressional laws.

Tucson's proximity to border cited

"Near-space and terrestrial operations” refers to attacks happening between the upper edges of the earth’s atmosphere down to physical ground maneuvers.

Near space is the area of about 12 miles above the Earth to the von Kármán line, the internationally accepted boundary separating Earth’s atmosphere from outer space.

“That’s an interesting space; we’re above regulated airspace, what nations claim as their airspace, but we’re below space,” Hahn said. “And so, this unregulated, uncontrolled region provides lots of opportunities for adversaries to come in. … We’ve added the word terrestrial because we realize that we need to bring this all the way down to the surface of earth. So, the drone can come in at tree-top level, and we’ve expanded this to take a near-space down to terrestrial space and tie this into this conversation about national security.”

Ellison said the UA’s location is prime for this work. “Because you’re right here; you’re at the border and this is about the border. This is about drones coming from there that are active with the cartels and the Chinese,” he said.

Hahn said the threats are changing daily, and the U.S. must be nimble and move quickly, and academia can help.

“What this partnership brings to the table is bringing the military side, these young bright officers, to partner with us, so that these two minds come together,” Hahn said. “They bring the problems, we help bring some of the technologies, and together we formulate solutions.”

U of A’s expertise in space research

A few months ago, the UA announced it is also participating in competing for contracts under President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense program, which has the goal of being able to intercept missiles “even if they are launched from space.”

Hahn said UA’s experts can help in the training part of the AETOS initiative with conversations about space domain awareness, optics, acoustics, drones, aerostats, hypersonics, and directed energy, while the program participants work on capstone-design projects to incorporate technologies.

Some of the capstone projects will be routed to the context of the Golden Dome projects, he added.

Hahn said the engineering college has hypersonic wind tunnels and put lasers in them with funding from the U.S. Defense Department last year. They run a hypersonic flow over an airfoil and hit it with energy from the laser, he said.

“We disrupted that boundary condition which can create aerodynamic instabilities, and that’s the first step towards maybe misdirecting the hypersonic weapon that’s coming in at the speed of light to make stabilities that make it uncontrollable,” he said. “So we got those neat ideas here, a lot of students involved in that work, and it’s pretty exciting how we can bring all of these pieces together.”

The AETOS program fits a trend at the UA in recent months of initiatives catering to national security work and research, including its participation in the Golden Dome missile defense program and its launch of the Kyl Institute for National Security.

Hahn said the UA has always contributed to national defense research.

“As engineers, we solve practical problems,” he said, “so now we want to move to, ‘Hey, how can we take some of our fundamental knowledges on understanding the aerodynamics of drones (and) use that aerodynamics and that understanding of flight and motion, couple that with some sensing technologies, bring in some AI (artificial intelligence) on the back end, and integrate those together to come up with algorithms that can detect a drone that’s coming over the border?’“

Hahn said if a drone is a threat to the U.S. and is coming across the border, the source doesn’t matter — whether it’s a nation-state, a cartel or a terrorist.

“The bottom line is the threat needs to be stopped, and if we can bring together our brightest minds to solve a very real national security problem, that’s an exciting thing for us,” Hahn said.